Q in DevOps

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We all have been talking about it for a quite long time – Agility and DevOps (or DevSecOps). Inherently all of these include a lot of focus on the quality outcomes to the end-user with a faster turn-around time. While Agile talks about Value Generation, the DevOps pipeline is the vehicle that enables Value Delivery. This is all great. But today I want to share about the Q that many times are still a back-bencher.

With my many engagements with different organisations across the globe, I see a pattern that at times disturbs me and I feel that it definitely needs a lot more focus. I have observed many times that the Q is yet to be shifted left.

What is Q? It is the Quality. While the Agile techniques including user story writing increase the focus on the User Experience and enable better testability, to be able to shift the Q to the left on the pipeline, it needs to be automated. And, I see that it is still largely a significant effort in most of the organisations and also costly. But then I see the Unit Testing frameworks are also not being used effectively.

A couple of years ago when I was working with one of the customer organisations, I stumbled upon a big surprise and big dismay. Some codes are having unit tests that do not check the assertions for the expected outcomes. While the test coverage was showing good numbers, the actual effectiveness was still not there. I do not want to discuss these challenges today. Rather, I wanted to present my observations on the lack of test automation.

So, is it real that Q is absent from the scene? I think, it depends on the overall maturity of the development team and/or the organisation structure. Some teams start with DevOps while their test automation is still in a nascent stage. While, for some organisations, the testing is a separate capability and separate org from the development team and runs at different speeds. While the first set of organisations start the automation journey, it is not in an equal pace and the expected outcome from the DevSecOps framework implementation is not well achieved. For the organisations, where testing is still in a silo and achieves better maturity in terms of testing capability, the testing process is generally seen to be running in parallel and does not collaborate on the pipeline. The testing teams will set up separate pipelines that are triggered (mostly) manually to run the tests and the test rig is set up manually and not reproducible in a short span of time.

I believe, there is a big need for bringing in the test automation to the same pipeline. I understand that the degree of test automation varies due to many factors. However, I believe the test automation is still lagging.

I remember one of my coworkers in one product development organisation. The product was developed using Delphi. My expert friend used to write the application and then write almost equal or at times more volume of code to test the application he just coded. No testing member could ever find a bug in his code submission. I really salute those capabilities. As more and more test frameworks are evolving, today we may not need so much effort to automate testing. I strongly think that the Q is still not getting the right degree of focus.

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