Market trend No. 1: testOps
Our digital world is constantly changing and evolving. With its rapid growth, much has changed in the market, and new trends are constantly emerging that companies around the world have to keep up with. More and more organizations have already digitized their services and products and equipped them with high quality. The latest trend is therefore for something different: releasing one’s top services and products as fast as possible without sacrificing their quality.
The focus of software development and delivery has therefore changed to serving the business, which has meant a lot of restructuring. There was a shift in the way of working from Waterfall to Agile, test automation has increased, and even the testers’ whole mindset has swapped.
All this is already one big step in the direction of faster delivery and good quality, but it can be even better: with testOps.
What is testOps?
TestOps completely reinvents the purpose of software testing.
It is the perfect combination of QA processes, operations, test automation, and the best testing practices during software development. This trend shifts the overall focus from test coverage to risk coverage, which allows for covering the highest business risks first and therefore speeds up the whole process. Combined with testOps’ strong focus on automation – ranging from test automation to process automation – and the alignment with DevOps, one is able to not only achieve great speed but also ensure high quality at the same time.
Moreover, testOps allows for fast and reliable feedback for businesses, so that the decision of whether a product or service can go to the market can be made as soon as possible.
In case you want to know more about the testOps framework, take a look at our white paper. There, you can find a more detailed description of what it is and the benefits it brings.
How testOps catapults software delivery management to the next level
Since software delivery is at the center of the focus, let’s take a look at how testOps improves its whole procedure.
Step 1
Automation test creation
TestOps supports test automation at every level of software development. This reaches from unit testing all the way up to end-to-end testing. When operating in its environment, the motto in this first stage is: “Forget about manual testing!”
After all, to a certain extent, manual tests are no longer needed. Unit tests, for example, can be completely automated. The focus in testOps is to create as many functional automation test cases as possible to create a framework that the testers can work with later on.
Step 2
Automated executions and rapid feedback
The automatic execution of each test case is also one of the main characteristics of testOps. Each test that was created during step 1 can therefore run without any human interaction. This saves a tremendous amount of time and resources on the one hand, and it gives more flexibility by allowing to schedule the executions as required on the other. In that manner, any test execution can run during the night, for example.
In addition, testOps gives all teams a real-time overview of their executions (= constant monitoring) and introduces the concept of alerting instead of excessive reporting. Alerting means that after each execution, error messages pop up in case something went wrong. So, if no message appears on the teams’ screens after a run, they can automatically be sure that there was no failure whatsoever.
Step 3
Process automation for continuous testing
Last but not least, testOps lets the testers achieve continuous testing by taking the automation executions and plugging them into CI/CD pipelines. Within them are also automated quality gates, as testOps goes beyond pure test automation. It is no longer necessary to waste uncountable hours analyzing, discussing, and making decisions. Furthermore, this approach, combined with covering the most crucial business risks one after the other, enables decreasing business risks to the bare minimum.
No more error-prone projects and day-long delays! Instead, testOps greatly accelerates delivery without sacrificing quality – and provides a great overview of the delivery’s condition at the same time. This all together pushes release testing to a whole new level.
NextendIT – Your testOps solution
Do you want to enter the world of testOps, but don’t know how or which tools to use? We have the answers you are looking for.
As pioneers in testOps and after years of experience, we highly recommend Tricentis Tosca as a tool for test automation. It offers many capabilities that are compatible with testOps. However, if you are completely new to this tool, its various functionalities may be a bit confusing at first. As certified Tricentis partners, we know the Tosca framework very well and are always happy to help our customers master the tool. So, check out our services and reach out to us if you need help!
Once you know how to use Tosca, we recommend that you optimize it and make the most of it with NextendIT. NextendIT is our testOps solution, which lets you orchestrate all your testOps activities and supports agility in all kinds of setups. It enables all teams to access test artefacts from different Tosca repositories, build end-to-end execution chains with them, and fully automate the whole delivery process. Click here for more information!
