Today’s 3 biggest testing challenges in a DevOps world and how to solve them.

DevOps is about collaboration and processes throughout an entire lifecycle with business alignment. When done right, it can result in efficient and accelerated software development. However, DevOps can also create some unique and difficult testing challenges. Overall, DevOps puts the onus on the testing function to increase velocity without missing defects and keeping deployment on track. From a velocity perspective, there are three main challenges to testing in a DevOps environment.

Challenge #1: Dependency on automation testers. There is a huge dependency on automation testers today, which leads to increased costs. Reliance on the underlying technology and writing code makes it difficult to overcome this challenge. But what if you could empower your manual testers and even business users that don’t know anything about code with automation – no programming required?

Challenge #2: Testing doesn’t address business needs and functions. The second biggest challenge in testing velocity today is that automation specialists don’t usually understand functional processes like business users. This can slow down testing with a lot of back-and-forth between teams. This lack of business and functional understanding can also lead to scope leakage.

Challenge #3: Few existing solutions make it easy to develop automation scripts. The lack of user-friendly options that manual testers can use in developing automation scripts can make for long turnaround times – a killer in the DevOps world. But, if manual testers are empowered to develop and maintain automation scripts easily, testing collaboration can plow along at an accelerated rate that aligns with deployment goals and deadlines.

So, what’s the solution to these pretty significant challenges? The answer is a test automation framework. The right testing automation framework offers advantages such as improved test efficiency, lower maintenance costs, minimal manual intervention, and maximum test coverage.

At Quinnox, we’ve developed a test automation framework that offers these benefits, as well as faster turnarounds, accelerated execution, and improved quality. The Quinnox Test Automation Framework (QTAF) is a scriptless framework developed for automating web- and mobile-based applications. QTAF was developed to meet the growing demand for DevOps testing velocity and solves the three specific challenges above very effectively.

For example, with QTAF, your entire project team can churn out automated scripts lightning-fast in a DevOps project, all without worrying about the underlying technology or writing code. This, in turn, also solves for the second challenge because you’ll rely much less on specialists – QTAF takes care of the automation.

Finally, With QTAF, you can empower those who best understand your business and functional processes to be responsible for testing, which solves the third challenge. QTAF eliminates the back and forth between teams too, bringing much greater efficiency and speed to testing – without sacrificing testing quality.

So, if you want your testing velocity to keep pace with DevOps, consider a test automation framework, particularly one that disperses these top three headwinds to testing velocity, such as QTAF.

For more details on QTAF and Testing, please write to us at [email protected]