Page - 35 - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

Testing in DevOps 35 overtheirdeliverables.Apipelinecanhelpateamdeploytheirserviceandverifythe qualityinanautomatedway.InDevOpsteams, itshouldempowerall teammembers to deploy any version on any environment with the right controls in place. The pipelinecanlimit thecomplexityofdeployingandtestingaservice.Theknowledge difference between team members can be smaller when every team member could deployand test a servicewitha pushofa button. Continuoustestingcanactascontinuousprocesswhereeverytimethepipelineis started testsarebeingexecuted.Testscanactasgoorno-gopoints in thepipelineto go to the next step in the process. It also gives the team up-to-date feedbackon the quality of their service in different stages of development.Testing can also be used to test theautomation. It canhelpunderstandif the automationexecutes thecorrect steps in a correct way. This includes the automation used for deploying services on differentenvironments.With deployment testing, a team can take control of the infrastructure and check whether it is in the state where it should be. Testing will give teamscontrolon their automationwhen theyare relyingmuchmoreon it. 4.3 Monitoring It is increasingly common to arrange monitoring from the start of software development. With an end-to-end responsibility in DevOps teams, monitoring is a way to get feedback from the service on production environments to the teams. Monitoring can vary from technical monitoring on server level: measuring CPU usage, memory, etc., to more functionalmonitoring:how many users are logged in etc.Functionalmonitoringgivestoacertaindegreeinsight intocustomerperception of the service. It can allow teams to track customers through their usage of the service. It couldbearguedthatmonitoringcanreplacepartsof testing. IfaDevOps team has reached“the thirdway” [7], theygather feedbackcontinuouslyandexperiment with theirservice.Monitoringcanhelptheteaminthegatheringfeedback.Thethird way is when teams are mature enough to deliver new features fast and experiment to see whatfits the needsof the customer. Monitoring should be a more reactive way of getting feedback where testing is a more proactive approach. That is mainly because monitoring is focused on productionenvironmentsand therefore a later step in the process. Testing can start atanearlypoint in theprocessandgivesteamsmoreoptionstoadaptto theoutcome oftesting.Monitoringcanactasawayof testingwhenteamsareable toadaptquick totheoutcomeofmonitoring.If teamscancreatenewfeaturesanddeploythemfast, using, for instance, Continuous Deployment, teams can react fast. Monitoring can act asbusiness facing tests critiqueof the productandwouldfit in theAgile testing quadrant [18].