TestOps — the key to competitiveness in the 21st century

It's a huge cliche, yet one of the most important fundamentals of business even at the turn of 2022-2023: time is money. IT companies and their customers using TestOps systems are well aware of this, and this complex development, operation and quality assurance technology gives them significant competitive advantages. Let's see what exactly it is about!

In today's fast-paced world, it is extremely important to be able to deliver quickly, accurately and continuously to our customers — whether it is a mobile application or a more serious system development, this is an equally important aspect. Recognizing this need, it is becoming increasingly common to talk about different OPS-like methods. Given the considerable interest, this time we will say a few words about the rise of TestOps.

The rise of cloud-based devices has enabled easier automation and deployment of applications, leading to the spread of agile, multi-functional practices to facilitate software delivery processes. These include the DevOps, BizOps, TestOps, CloudOps, AIOps, MLOPs, and DataOps method, all of which fall under the umbrella term XOps.

But what is TestOps?

When using the TestOps technique, development, operation and quality assurance work together to deliver more valuable and time-saving products to the market as a result. By using TestOps, you can reduce development and testing time, so you can improve quality significantly faster and with less effort.

TestOps performs the primary quality assurance task with a DevOps solution to interact with the operation of the CI/CD and build continuous testing. According to TestOps, the three teams Dev, Ops and QA collaborate for rigorous CI/CD testing. The smooth work of the three teams with the TestOps technique requires different steps and approaches.

The key to successful TestOps is a combination of principles, and often the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. The principles outline what needs to be tested, and the application of AI ultimately ensures that test automation is robust enough for operational testing.

Principles of TestOps

It is important to automate only the simplest, most reliable, and most important tests; perform them as often as possible; and warn of possible errors.

Modern TestOps teams, in the spirit of this, automate only “easy” and important tests. If the test is difficult to automate, it means that more resources are being spent on it than could have been spent on other test cases. Difficulty and complexity are the enemies of reliability. TestOps test cases must be highly reliable because they are performed frequently and with high visibility within the development and operations teams.

Like the unit and API tests written by developers, the goal of TestOps is to make the tests run as often as possible, and many parts of the development and operations teams detect errors in their processes as early as possible. In agile and modern application teams, test automation most often runs as an aftermarket and background process that is only monitored by testers. TestOps tests should aim to run everywhere in order to get the most out of your test automation investment. The main thing is that fewer tests are run, but they are often and reliably.

Applying TestOps practices as part of the Software Development Lifecycle (SLDC) brings many benefits, including lower development costs, faster development phase, higher quality end products, and early market launch. These practices can improve collaboration between teams and make businesses more competitive.

Author:
János Szenfner

Sources:
https://katalon.com/resources-center/blog/what-is-testops
https://www.xenonstack.com/insights/testops-framework
https://devops.com/shift-right-testing-the-emergence-of-testops/
https://about.codecov.io/blog/an-introduction-to-testops/
https://anarsolutions.com/emergence-of-testops/