A place to share ideas, techniques, resources about all the testing activities needed to feel confident about delivering value to our customers frequently and sustainably.
I am going to share five handy tips for testers in today’s DevOps world from my experience in this post.
Learn Continuous Testing
The first and foremost thing to learn about is: what is
continuous testing
? How do DevOps processes impact the tester’s approach for transitioning from traditional waterfall to agile testing? Before starting with continuous testing, for each sprint, we were testing incrementally and then did the regression testing before deployed to production. Up to now, our sprint cycles for some projects have been weekly or bi-weekly. But this cycle becomes too long to roll out a feature or customer request in a timely way. So, we have adopted DevOps in our process.
Testing over the whole lifecycle by shifting left and shift right, i.e. testing continuously from beginning to end.
Learn about DevOps jargon.
I recommend taking a look at
Lisa Crispin’s course
in Test Automation U to learn basic concepts and terminology around continuous delivery and DevOps. That will help you communicate and collaborate with everyone involved in delivering your product, including operations and infrastructure specialists.
A Culture Shift from an Independent Team to Whole Team Approach
In a waterfall methodology, testing is confined to an independent verification and validation team. In agile development, it becomes a collaborative effort.
People come with baggage: preconceived notions, past experiences, prejudices. The primary responsibility is educating the team about DevOps culture.
In DevOps culture, the focus is on the product, not building fiefdoms and amassing political power. The DevOps slogan is, “Everyone involved with delivering software is responsible for delivering high-quality software.” In short, the delivery becomes a shared responsibility.
Build A Successful Test Strategy
Building the right test strategy is critical in continuous testing. When we have 500 automated tests, we can’t execute all the 500 tests for each change committed in the pipeline. It will take too much execution time. So, we have analyzed and prioritized the test cases by their core functionality as well as using input from the customer support and business teams. In the end, we have come up with 100 automated regression tests which are enough to give us confidence that the latest change hasn’t broken existing features.
Don’t Just Make The Tests Pass, Focus on Efficiency
When we started with DevOps, in our continuous pipeline, our automation tests failed in between or at the last step of the pipeline. We analyzed the test results and the error logs. Most of the errors were due to timeouts or because of the new feature or enhancement changes. We have updated our scripts periodically to take care of this. After deployment, when we cross verified the product/project using manual exploratory testing, we saw a few more failures. Then we did a brainstorming session with our entire product team to make our automated tests more efficient. For this, we have created/updated the automation scripts in the preproduction phase to save time and resources.
Choose Your Tests Wisely
This is related to the points discussed in the previous paragraph. When we started doing the deployment through the DevOps practices, as testers, we need to choose our tests wisely to add those to the pipeline. Along with the regression test suites, 24/7 monitoring should be added. This helps us to understand how the product is to be used by the customers. For choosing the tests, we use input from the user behaviors that we learn from our monitoring tools, as well as discussions with the business stakeholders.
I hope the information from this experience helps you to enhance your testing!
I hold a Certified Software Test Manager and Six Sigma Green Belt. I have a passion for testing and learning, as well as implementing and mentoring the latest automation tools. I spent the last 16+ years working in IT, with a focus on software quality assurance and software testing. I am Testing Guild 2018 conference speaker and a frequent blogger. I manage a fast-growing, dynamic team bringing you
https://www.qatouch.com
. Twitter: . Linkedin: . Blog :
www.bhavaniraj.com
One fine day disruption was created inour organisation as part of digital transformation with few people fromoperations joining us – Developer, Tester, Product-owner.
…And we all moved into a NEW world ofDevOps. There were lot of uncertainties about what it would be like? Lot ofquestions whether there will be any role as tester? If there is what that rolewould involve?
As we all moved into DevOps world, allthese questions were getting clear. Our application demanded lots ofnon-functional testing along-with functional. In a DevOps world, it was allabout getting the feedback early and do frequent releases with a good quality.For a tester what it meant for me is to learn the process of continuousintegration and delivery and the testing for not just functional but also fornon-functional. Non-functional testing involved Security, Performance, Visual,Accessibility and reduce dependency on external teams to carry-out thesetesting to delivery faster. In short a Swiss Army Knife’s worth of skills (knowingdifferent types of testing). To top that it should be automated for quick-releases,so enough time is spent in doing exploratory testing and finding the unknowns.
To address that I came-up with the test-automation pyramid model, as illustrated by
to help team visualize & discuss test automation strategy. I will share how I modelled the test-automation pyramid to suit our DevOps world and overview all the testing involved in terms of functional & non-functional in an automated way to deliver faster without compromising on quality.
There are so many forms & interpretations of Test automation pyramid. All point out the same thing it should have more no. of unit tests, followed by service (consisting of API, Integration, Component) tests and finally UI tests.
There’s this another way of looking test pyramid as a Bug-Filter.
But have you noticed it doesn’t talk aboutnon-functional testing. Does that mean non-functional testing are not automatedor part of test automation? For me test automation stands for – tests which areautomated, run by machine/tool scripts and asserted pass/fail on ourexpectations.
At least it should say Functional Testpyramid. But I can see functional test automation is the most widelyimplemented form of automation and it has kind-of become synonymous with test automation.Also, Manual/Exploratory Testing bit is not captured properly. Exploratory Testingcan happen at any level – Unit, API, UI and for different types – Security,Performance, etc.
The test pyramid is an effective visualisationform outlining your testing approach which can be easily explained to others.Just make it visible on a board/wall and you have a very good indicator of howyou want to organise your testing efforts in one picture. It is a better visualreplacement for long test strategy documents.
As earlier mentioned, in our application we have lot of non-functional testing. So, I have taken these existing models and made changes to better suit our application. I will now explain how I view this test pyramid and apply it to testing in DevOps.
Test Automation Pyramid re-visited
So here is my interpretation.
Software testing is about identifyingRISKS and not finding bugs. Based on this, Imagine Test Pyramid to beupside-down as a RISK Filter, having all the different types of testing –Functional in UI, Service, Unit. Non-functional in Performance, Security and Others.
Now imagine the newly developedproduct or feature enters the pyramid for identifying risks, meaning carryingout functional tests in UI, Service, Unit-level and identifying functionalrisks.
Similarly, performance testing foridentifying performance risks, security testing for identifying security risks,and so on for other risks.
All these risks identified are byautomation meaning asserting our expectations or checking known behaviours. Whatabout Unknowns or new information. These will be identified by Exploratorytesting at every level – Unit, API, UI and for different types – Security,Performance, etc.
Do all the identified risks need to befixed? Absolutely NO. The team will prioritise it as high, medium, low etc. andfixed as per priority. Once all the prioritised risks are fixed then releasethe product/feature with known risks.
This is how test pyramid is applied in our case in testing in DevOps, making sure all the testings are done at each and every level from RISK perspective to achieve quality and deliver faster.
Functional Automation
Let’s talk about functional test automation. I will be just covering UI testing. There are so many functional test-automation tools, most popular ones being Selenium, Sahi, Katalon, Ranorex, NightwatchJS. And to implement best practices test there are frameworks such as Page-Object Models, BDD, TDD, Keyword & Data driven, Hybrid and so on. Depending upon your preference select the framework suiting your needs. There are no good or bad frameworks, it’s all about what best suits your application and your team. Same goes with the tools.
Non-Functional Testing
Quality of a software depends not onlyon Functional but Non-functional testing such as Security, Performance, VisualUI, Accessibility and so on.
Security Testing
Securitytesting is a process of identifying weakness in the security mechanisms ofan application that protects data and maintain functionality asintended. Purpose is to make the application immune to SQL injections,cross-site scripting, sensitive data exposure to protect Unauthorized andUnauthenticated users to enter in to your application. All these can bedriven through a tool and tested through test-automation.
Thereare various tools available where you can automate security tests and run aspart of CI/CD process. This automated activity necessarily doesn’t removemanual Penetration testing requirement. Through automation, it is beneficial tofind basic vulnerabilities in our application as much as possible so thatSecurity Specialists/Penetration testers can focus on identifying high-hangingbugs. This helps in delivering at a faster pace by finding basicvulnerabilities early in development phase which in turn saves Penetrationtester’s time so that they can concentrate where it adds value.
Performance Testing
Performance testing is about identifyingperformance issues such as slow response time, support for concurrent users,how much load the application can handle? Does the application crash? Also, it involvesnot only testing the server-side but the client-side as well. As can be seenfrom the chart, 80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end.Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components of the page – images,stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc.
To verify if an application is fast and efficient enough we perform client-side performance tests. This means checking the response time of a web application from the point of view of a single user. Both server and client side can be automated with pass/fail criterion if it doesn’t match the performance benchmarks. Usually performance tests are run once the functional tests are done and/or just before few weeks before the release. But executing performance tests early whenever new API is built (Server-side) and a new page is built (Client-side) helps to get early feedback and reduce any delays incurring from the issues identified later in the development phase.
Visual Testing
Visual UI testing consists about
Does your UI look the way it should, to allyour users?
Visual UI testing is about verifying that UI appears correctlyto your users. For detecting correct icon-size, padding, colour, layout, text,element position etc. It’s a quick way to check all these through visualautomation. It saves time and eye strain.
Angie Jones:
Even if the application passes functional testing, we still must check the look and feel of UI because the element might be not aligned properly or hidden behind some other element which the end user is not able to see. Visual UI testing is the best way to identify such issues and if integrated with functional tests gives a lot more confidence about the UI. This can be easily seen in the below image. Functional tests for this would pass but not Visual UI testing.
Accessibility Testing
Accessibility testing is a subsetof usability testing, and it is performed to ensure that the applicationbeing tested is usable by all the people and not only for people with disabilities.Accessibility is about ensuring inclusive applications are built for one andall, making an application equally accessible and usable for a normal user too.Purpose is to provide everyone with equal access to the application and meetingthe standards set in web content accessibility guidelines –
WCAG
.
People with disability will use navigation strategies like tabbing through the headings, links on webpages, images and videos with properly described text for accessing. So as a tester we need to test whether it follows the standard or meet the compliance having proper tab flow, recommended headings, alternate text for images, videos etc. Accessibility testing can also be automated to check whether the application has elements well structured, alternate texts and contents are described well or not.
Exploratory Testing
Exploratorytesting is the key to high quality software, it’s highly intellectual and time-consumingactivity. It is an investigative approach and main intent is to uncover newinformation or covering the unknowns in all areas of testing from functional,security, performance, visual and accessibility or any other types of testing. Oftenthis activity is pushed off to end-users.
The image below shows how testing from a risk perspective can be used to bridge the gap between automated testing (asserting expectations) and manual/exploratory testing (uncovering new information), so that lot of unknowns will be explored and converted into automated known behaviours to improve the quality. Exploratory testing helps in creating good automation tests to figure out all the things you want to go and check.
Continuous Testing
Continuous testing
right from requirement to production and taking feedback from production to requirement, this loop of continuous testing is key to achieve highest quality. Below image shows all the different types of testing we perform in various stages of DevOps.
Conclusion
As explained in my DevOps Testingpyramid, testing should always be done from a risk perspective and identifiedrisks should be prioritised and fixed accordingly for delivering qualityproduct faster.
In DevOps, automated testing is key tospeed-up the development cycle. By automation, I mean non-functional testing aswell. In a DevOps world, tester should possess Swiss Army Knife’s worth ofskills, which means as a tester it’s our responsibility to do all otherrelevant types of testing as much as possible apart from functional testing toget early feedback and not depend on external teams. Depending on externalteams might increase the risk for not getting the feedback early and delay therelease. Also, don’t forget to put all the tests including non-functional inCI/CD pipeline to get early and constant feedback on quality.
Continuous testing in all the stages iskey to achieve highest quality. It’s important to be tool aware and practiceidentifying good tools and use them whatever suits to your application and toyour team. Exploratory testing is the key to high quality software and pleasedon’t push it to end-users. Utilize as much time as possible in exploring theapplication for uncovering new information for improving quality.
Lastly, no matter what strategy andprocesses you have the team should have Quality mindset to go extra mile andadd that extra effort to deliver quality to the end user. This is accomplishedby Continuous Testing and doing all the relevant functional and non-functionaltesting at every stage so that
quality is cascaded
down to theend-user.
Testers have many diverse capabilities – just like a Swiss Army Knife!
I would like to end my blog – DevOpsis all about early feedback and frequent releases and for that
Testers should possess a Swiss Army Knife’sworth of skills, versatile and approaching the application from all the differentaspects of testing!!!
About the author
Amit Kulkarni
Amit Kulkarni (@amtoya on Twitter) is a test automation specialist and has over 10 years of experience delivering quality product for clients in Australia, Europe, Japan and USA. Amit is passionate about test automation for both functional and non-functional including security and performance testing. Amit has a diversified experience in Semiconductor technology, Embedded and Software industry in the field of Banking, Healthcare and Consumer Electronics working for companies such as Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Qualcomm and Telstra. Amit is currently working as a Senior Quality Engineer in Bankwest and driving best quality practices in test automation and continuous testing to deliver quality product faster.
Open Sourcing Your Mindset
By Brendan Connolly
Asdevelopment has shifted from waterfall to agile and now DevOps, at each stageyou see developers taking on more responsibility and accountability.
Waterfallwas isolationist, building silos around different groups in softwaredevelopment. Developers owned the act of coding and in the stereotypicaldeveloper way, had little to no interest what happened before or after theycoded. Other roles on teams in many ways acted as insulators to keep externalforces away from developers.
Agilewas developers pulling that insulation away, shifting themselves left andtaking more ownership of the product creation process. Developers found theyrequired a real time feedback loop to build the right things and successfullyreact to change.
DevOpsis essentially the same process on the right side of the spectrum. Developmenttakes more ownership of deployment, monitoring and supporting the applicationshealth. It’s just too slow and cumbersome to react to the requirements ofmaintaining applications by filtering feedback through separate teams at scale.
Thebenefits of integration outweigh the cost of the additional responsibility.
Code Continuous
Tocope with the additional responsibilities, developers have turned to theirtrusty friend
code
.
Withagile we see rise of tooling developed for
ContinuousIntegration
to alleviate the pain and reduce the risk in iterativedevelopment.
InDevOps we see the rise of code and tools supporting
Continuous Deployment
. Even when many teams already had productinstallers, or automated deployments what was missing was the integration ofthat information.
Ifdevelopers are owning more of the product as well as release and deployments,then testing naturally gets swept up in the process. In fact we see thispattern emerging with the concept of
ContinuousTesting
. Code is being written, tools created to help solve the issue ofintegrating test execution and reporting into teams release pipeline. Thefeedback loop is extended to provide rapid information to make it easier andfaster for development to be responsive to change.
Continuous Testing
Automatedtesting is a loaded term. In developer circles it almost exclusively means unitand possibly integration tests. In QA it almost almost exclusively means end toend (e2e) tests, and is often synonymous with
Selenium
.
Onteams where both sets of tests exist, their worlds may seldom interact.Developers may be aware of the
e2e
tests but they probably aren’t writing them and even less likely running them.
ContinuousTesting has nothing to do with the testing that most QA team members are mostfamiliar with, exploratory testing. The purpose of the code and tooling thatcomprises a pipeline isn’t for there to be some manual intervention requiredpart of the way through it. Putting exploratory testing somewhere in the laterstages for the pipeline is akin to pointing a fire hose at someone and askingthem to direct the flow to the next stage.
Ifthe
speed of DevOps
wasn’t enough, the presence of
continuous testing
only puts morepressure on testers, simply because more attention is being drawn to testing.
Automationengineers and product engineers are being drawn closer together. The importanceand relevance of end to end automated tests is becoming more of a reality forproduct developers as they become run regularly as a post deploy verificationtests.
Whilecode is being thrown at testing with newfound passion, exploratory testers needto be prepared for their time in the spotlight. If automated tests are runningall the time what tests are you doing? What makes them special? Why are theyrequired before we can deploy?
What do you do different than Selenium?
Beforeyou dismiss that question, pause and consider what all selenium and the testsit drives truly provide.
Seleniumis cross browser, scalable, schedulable, repeatable, and can provide logs andscreenshots of its tests. Can you compete with that?
Flaky,slow, and wrong sometimes, you say? And you and all other humans aren’t?
Conversationsthat try to explain using people instead of machines for testing software canend up justifying them under the guise of
thereare some tests that aren’t good candidates for automation
.
Don’t settle for executing tests that don’t have enough ROIto automate.
Thistype of conversation relies on the belief that testing is comprised to twoelements:
test case creation
and
test execution
. Perhaps at its most baselevel testing is just that, the value proposition of the role is in the nuancethat a skilled tester can provide to teams through those elements.
Testersdo more than a fill a gap in automated test coverage. The problem is manytesters express this nuance solely through actions.
Developersproduce code, a measurable artifact from their effort. The generation of thatartifact is often backed by computer science, a formalized area of study.Artifacts of effort are reassuring, people like to see the fruits of theirlabors. Tangible results can be measured and quantified, they might even helpestimate future effort.
Joan of Arc
A tester’s value tends to be recognized at the same rate as relationships develop. Testers get characterized as
folk heroes
rather than members of a skilled profession. There’s no trade, education, or craft just individuals saving the day periodically.
The Intuition trap
Evenwhen teams do value testing, people are usually primarily concerned with theprogression or regression of testing efforts. Testers comments in stand-ups caneasily turn into a user story status change report:
Passed this ticket, working this ticket, noblockers
Ifyou aren’t taking the opportunity to discuss your actual actions in stand ups,then you may fall prey to the intuition trap. When you talk about your workthis way, sometimes you end up actually working this way.
Open Source Your Mindset
It’sfun being a hero, but there’s no skill in being
Superman
or
Superwoman
(I was going to say Wonder Woman, but she actually trained and I think everyonerecognized that. So if you are the teams Wonder Woman then kudos, you haveserious skills but I digress).
Whentesting goes smoothly the result is
nothing
.Testing isn’t required for things to go right, it just might help prevent athing going wrong.
Opensourcing your mindset means
teaching
others another way to look at and interact with their code, or the product.This cuts both ways though, it means being willing to accept a pull request ofoutside perspective. Openly integrating new ideas into your
testers mindset
.
Replace Execution with Communication
. Like acting or athletics there might be a script or game plan to start with but there is a lot going on behind the scenes, adapting to circumstance and being thought up on the fly. It’s intuition driven.
Whenactions, practices and motivations are not being verbalized and expressed tothe team and stakeholders it puts testing on the level of superstitions andtoken time sacrifices to the quality gods.
Testersneed to pry open this experience, expose the internals driving motivations.Breaking out of that shell grants visibility into a testers actions andmotivations to provide a context for team members to attribute value.
Replace Isolation with Collaboration
Itcan be uncomfortable or difficult to open up and share what goes through your
testing mindset
.
Theadditional ownership developers have taken in DevOps has changed relationshipdynamics. What was at one point a contentious us vs. them relationship is muchmore open. There just isn’t the time to have as much formal process drivencommunication. Success at scale requires collaboration, pairing and mobbingmore.
When with developers, it’s an opportunity to test at their desk, against their local changes. There are risks testing here, the developers local setup is definitely different than production but so are the testing and staging environments. Let go of the taboo of
it works on my machine
and consider what can be tested here and what needs to be covered on a different stage. Take the opportunity to work together when the code is the freshest in the developers mind and where they are most comfortable.
It’s not only about working with developers. Mob testing with
UX
and
Product
alongside developers is a way to draw the entire team together. When the team is together seeing how the application is working it bypasses all the communication gates. There is no need for a separate follow-up conversations to loop someone in, that person can see and feel how things are working by being a part of the group experience.
Replace Tedium with Stratagem
Teamsare more open to testing and sharing in quality than ever. Testers have beenbuilding quality mindsets for years. Developers are building tooling but teamsare looking for guidance and mentorship in
Quality
.
Testing isn’t just button pressing, by showing that through communication and working together we elevate our status. Draw people together, into the quality circle, and enable the team to be more comfortable and aware of testing. We can set working agreements, talk about overarching strategy for how testing throughout the development cycle builds quality in. We can embrace automated testing as a team activity where unit, integration and end to end coverage is part of a teams strategy for mitigating risk. We can forgo complete control of testing and opt into being a voice of authority and expertise in quality.
Brendan Connolly is an experienced Software Tester, Automator, Speaker, and Blogger. Currently he is a Senior Quality Engineer at Procore Technologies in Santa Barbara, California. He maintains a testing blog @ http://www.brendanconnolly.net
