By Toyer Mamojee
The journey of the ‘typical tester’ has been a pretty bumpy ride over the past few years, more so recently with the massive uptake of DevOps. Apart from the many new and intimidating terms thrown our way, we are now required to do anything from digging in to business case details to monitoring how applications are performing in Production. It’s become a world which is very different to the one a tester would have experienced around the year 2005 or so.This world has incorporated testing to be at the heart of it, and not just testing but full on quality! So its only natural for the tester to play a massive role here.
But what can we do?
As mentioned, the tester should be at the very heart of every activity happening in the software delivery process. Below I highlight some of the areas where testers can directly influence and should influence if the process is to go from just being alive, to becoming Alive and Kicking!
Help Sculpt a Team Culture (Team player)
When one speaks about DevOps, technical aspects are usually at the front of the conversation whereas the softer aspects like Team culture and communication are very rarely mentioned.
Everyone loves quality products, testers love quality. A good healthy, dedicated team can help make better quality products. So naturally a tester should be one of the key individuals to drive a dedicated team. Testers should keep their critical thinking quality as their most prized asset by asking the right question at key moments during team discussions/meetings and interactions. This gets the team thinking and hopefully to a point where this starts to become second nature to all team members. Quality should be a driving force of every team member in everything they do, this should be a non-negotiable principle.
Another key area around team culture is by re-iterating the culture of ‘safe to fail’ and the ability to recover quickly. Without these important concepts inherent in a team the ability to deliver faster might prove to be a huge challenge.
Promote Visibility and Transparency (Seeing is believing)
I cannot stress how key this aspect is to a solid DevTestOps model. Gone are the days of working in isolation. A tester should look at some of the key artefacts that traditionally would fall within his/her space and how these can be made visible and transparent to the entire team.
Some of these include Test coverage visibility, defect statuses per sprint and release, test automation coverage, test automation scripts (functional and non-functional). One can make these visible in the form of dashboards or even repositories for test checklist or automation scripts.
At any point in time any team member should be able to give you the current status of your testing per sprint and/or release. After all if it is a difficult and an intensive process to decide on whether you are ready to deploy to production, then you have to question what you as the tester can do to change this.
Increase your skillset (Up your game)
A modern tester needs a modern armoury. Without it, I battle to see how the transition to the DevTestOps model can be easily made.There is so much to mention under this area, up-skilling should span these key areas:
Automation tools
From backend to front end focused automation tools, a tester should not only know these tools but know when and where to use them. Tools learned should include those which at least cover API testing, UI Testing, Performance/Load Testing, Security and Databases.
Context switching between these tools and types of testing is a rather intimidating thought for those not usually exposed to modern ways of software delivery. My advice here is to take baby steps in learning these tools in order to not just learn something for the sake of it, but rather for the cause of true DevTestOps.
Technical Tools
Technical type tools that equip a tester to contribute effectively in a DevOps environment would once again span the entire spectrum of the application solution. Tools like Postman & Swagger for API testing, knowing your way around version control applications (GitHub, GitLab etc), SQL and NoSql interfaces (like DBKoda, Sql Server etc), CI/CD apps (TravisCI, GoCD, Jenkins etc) , Logging applications (GrayLog, ElasticSearch,ElkStack etc) and Monitoring tools (NewRelic, Dynatrace, Instana etc).
Contribute to your CI/CD (its in the pipeline)
Testers have a crucial part to play in defining the ideal pipeline for your applications deployment. Being part of discussions around composition of the pipeline, ideal duration of pipelines, pre and post deployment tests as part of the pipeline.
A point to consider even further is where do your automation tests fit in these pipelines? Should it be part of it?
CI/CD tools also promote to the point on visibility and transparency, if constructed properly the entire team should know exactly at what stage the deployment is at, what tests were run and the overall status of the deployments.
Monitor it (What’s trending?)
To know what your application is doing both in PROD and Test environments, contributes to how you approach your testing. Findings and trends even contribute to what scenarios you end up testing and has massive input regarding determining what load you put your system under during Performance testing as an example.
Traditionally testers would steer clear of any tool or application that falls outside the scope of testing, but in a fast paced delivery world, monitoring tools can be a testers best friend. A tester’s system or application knowledge should also push the tester to not just use existing monitoring metrics but to also determine what to include as part of monitoring.
In summary
The evolution into DevTestOps has meant that the tester now plays a much more involved role in the entire delivery process. The day to day tasks of a tester spans between a balance of soft skills, analytical, technical and even an investigative mindset sometimes seamlessly crossing between these tasks without even knowing. By following some of the pointers above the initial ground work to successful DevTestOps is well underway. Go on Testers, get DevTestOps Alive and Kicking in full swing!
Toyer Mamoojee is a ‘die-hard’ passionate Agile Automation Test Analyst with almost 16 years testing experience across many industries. From Waterfall to Agile approaches, Commercial to Open Source Automation tools and Manual to Automation Testing he has been through the wars of Software Delivery. He is the co-founder of Cape Town Automation User group and co-organizer of Cape Town Testing Meetup back in his home country of South Africa. In his spare time he loves exploring the great outdoors, taking on the world playing online video games , major football fan, adopting the title of technological husband and playing super dad to 2 pre-schoolers!
Toyer Mamoojee @tottiLfc