6 Best Practices that get you to robust Devops

 An extension to the preferred agile model, DevOps’ adoption has been growing faster than ever, gaining tremendous fame in the past few years. Keeping communication and integration as the key, it leverages on collaboration between operations, development and businesses, thus ensuring seamless and efficient deliveries.

The increasing number of organizations leveraging on DevOps to unleash the untapped potential and close barriers amidst their departments to build quicker and robust software and execute a seamless delivery, shows the potential DevOps has.

Proven Productivity Increase

Data proves that organizations following DevOps have seen a business expansion by 38%, as well as a productivity increase by 51%. (source) However, despite understanding DevOps and its working modalities, many companies struggle to efficiently incorporate DevOps into their IT framework.

Perhaps because this is a mindset and cultural change to be adopted rather than as a checklist for mere actions.

Process Automation

The most critical and essential step for a successful DevOps implementation is the end-to-end process automation. From infrastructure set-up, to configurations, from development, to testing and deployment – automation at all stages to ensure more frequent yet quality deliverables are met.

For instance in the testing process, an early identification of errors in development gives more opportunities for issues to be rectified as compared to the actual development phase. Hence, taking into account the continuous issues in parallel with ongoing development, a nimble automated testing adds more fuel to software development. Test automation can simply be achieved by determining priority test cases, then running and analyzing their relevance in different scenarios, and achieving quicker, consistent, accurate better quality deliveries.

Process automation at each stage is imperative to achieve DevOps.

Listed below are some DevOps best practices in process automation that can certainly help.

1. Integrated Configuration Management
2. Integrated Change Management
3. Continuous Integration
4. Continuous Testing
5. Continuous Delivery
6. Security – Monitoring & Alerts

Integrated Configuration Management

As the essential part of operations, configuration management enables agility – the base to DevOps.

Optimizing the use of existing systems in place and maintaining system-wide configurations across networks, servers, application, storage, and other managed services, configuration management enables the development teams to look at the bigger picture.

It promotes utilization of the existing services during the software development rather than investing time and efforts in reinventing the new services from scratch. Click to read more about this blog  : Devops 

If you are interested in learning more about Webomates’ CQ service please click here and schedule a demo or reach out to us at info@webomates.com

Software Testing Life Cycle

Software Testing is a mandatory part of any Software Development process. It ensures that all technical and business requirements are met satisfactorily. Software Testing Life Cycle (STLC) is a series of systematically planned phases in case of a waterfall software development approach and continuous iterative & agile in case of agile or iterative development of software. 

Software testing life cycle comprises of various activities with specific goals. Organizations may tweak these to align with their corporate philosophy, but the basic essence remains the same.

In the waterfall model, the activities are performed in  phases as shown in Waterfall diagram below, whereas in Agile model, all these activities are performed in every release, as shown in the following agile diagram below. 

Feature understanding and Test script updates are simultaneous activities which run in every release however, there are activities which are required only once like test environment setup and only new release deployment is required.

Lets understand how testing is carried out in the traditional waterfall approach. To know more about agile testing click here.

Requirement Analysis

• The QA team interacts with various stakeholders to understand their requirements for testability. The requirements can be either functional or non-functional in nature.
  
• Priorities are attached to the requirements for testing.
  
• The test conditions are defined in this phase. Every test condition should be traceable to a requirement. To aid this, a Requirement traceability Matrix is maintained where each requirement is mapped with test conditions. Requirement traceability Matrix helps in keeping track of testing. 
• Testing environment is identified during this phase.

Test Planning and Test Case Development

Test planning phase is sometimes referred to as Test Strategy phase. It is very important from technical and business point of view. 

• A detailed test plan is created in this phase.
• All testing strategies and approaches are defined.
• Risk Analysis, Risk management and mitigation strategies are defined.
• Scheduling is done for various testing phases.

Once test planning is completed, the team starts working on test cases based on inputs from planning phase.

• Detailed Test case Document is prepared.
• Test Scripts are prepared for tests marked for automation testing.
• Test cases and test scripts are reviewed by peers and managers to ensure complete coverage.
• Test data is prepared in test environment. Click to read more about this blog : Software Testing Life Cycle

If you are interested in learning more about Webomates’ CQ service please click here and schedule a demo or reach out to us at info@webomates.com

Test Failure Analysis With AI-Critical To DevOps

Software testing is an extremely important process to ensure that all quality requirements are met before any application is released in the market. With DevOps, the release cycles have become shorter, but expectations are still the same, i.e. high-quality end product. But, it is a fact that the tests fail sometimes and testing may hit a roadblock. Usually, a knee-jerk reaction is to pass the buck to the development team for fixing the issue. However, the ideal approach is to understand the root cause of the failure.

Test failure analysis is a systematic process to analyze and identify the underlying causes for a failed test and to prevent them from occurring again.

Test failure analysis is an important exercise that should be conducted for all critical test failures. Continuous testing generates a lot of data in terms of test results which can be utilized for test failure analysis which can help in sifting, identifying the cause, and fixing the issue. It helps in improving the overall QA Ops process by helping in managing and addressing the root causes of any issue.

Key elements of Test failure analysis

Failure in testing  analysis is a good quality control measure that provides you with insights on what exactly went wrong, at what point, and understand the reason behind it. This helps the teams in improving the testing strategy based on the findings by identifying whether the problem was a testing issue or a flaw in design and development.

Test failure analysis is tailored as per the organization’s QA process and the application under test. However, certain key elements are common across the board and are mentioned below.

Root cause analysis

Root cause analysis of the defect holds the key to understanding what exactly went wrong. 

Was it because of issues with the software or there was a problem with the test itself? 

Once this basic question is answered, it is time to trace the origin of the problem. The problem could be at any point in the whole development cycle: requirement gathering and understanding, or design and development, or in some cases environmental issues while testing. Once the origin is verified, the teams need to work on it for corrective action.

If there is an issue with the test, then the whole test plan needs to be re-examined and corrected before further testing can take place.

Addressing false failures

False failures are the bane of test automation. These are the cases when the automation system should have been able to correctly identify whether it is a Pass or Fail. Instead, it is incorrectly specified as a Fail. We have covered this in detail in our blog, click here to read more. False failures can lead to unnecessary delays because every failed test case  needs to be triaged and based on its priority needs to be addressed.

Detailed Reporting

Good reporting aids the teams to

• Understand test results
• Saves time in going through a huge amount of data that was generated while testing
• Helps in distinguishing between actual defects, script errors, feature change and the noise.
• Helps in addressing the key question of how many known defects are in the build, and can the shipping be delayed, while the test team works on classifying the automation failures as actual bugs or a re-test scenario.

Addressing the root cause

Once the actual defects have been identified and traced to their origins, the concerned team needs to first segregate the ones that need immediate attention and address them as per the priorities. Depending on the magnitude of the change, the re-test can be done within the same test cycle or a new sprint can be conducted just for testing.

Acing the test failure analysis with Webomates

In a typical test cycle, on average 30%-40% of tests fail. Though 93% of these failures are NOT related to defects and are false failures, they need to be triaged by the testing team to understand the underlying reason for these failures. Once the impacted test scripts are fixed, then the automated test run can be deemed a success with either true fails(i.e. defects) or true passes(scripts passed).

Webomates provides solutions to handle such scenarios with ease. Read for more : Test Failure Analysis 

If this has piqued your interest and you want to know more, then please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com. If you liked this blog, then please like/follow us Webomates or Aseem.

Performance Testing Vs Functional Testing

 An Ideal Software testing process has to be a holistic approach that involves combination of various testing techniques to achieve a high quality software. Broadly speaking, testing of any application can be broken down on the basis of two premises – “Operability” and “Efficiency”. “Operability” is taken care of by functional testing and “Efficiency” is taken care of by performance testing.

Functional Testing evaluates individual and cohesive behaviour functions of a software system to verify that they adhere to pre-defined specifications. It tests the functional accuracy, interoperability of subsystems and compliance with pre-defined standards in the context of functional and business requirements.

Performance testing is a non-functional testing technique that exercises a system and then, measures, validates and verifies the response time, stability, scalability, speed and reliability of the system in production-like environment. 

In this article, we will assess the differences between Performance and Functional testing.

	Performance Testing	Functional Testing
Objective	Validates performance	Validates behaviour
Focus Area	User expectations	User requirements
Test data input	Performance requirements	Functional Requirements
Test Execution Sequence	Done after functional testing	Done before performance testing
Testing Approach	Automation preferred	Manual or Automated or Crowdsource
Production test environment emulation	Preferred	Not mandatory
Infrastructural requirements	High	Minimal
Time taken for testing	Less	More
Impact of functional Requirement changes	No	Yes
Testing Tools examples	LoadRunner, Jmeter	Selenium, QTP, WinRunner

Conclusion

On close observation of the above table, it can be noticed that both the testing types complement each other. Performance testing validates that  application software can handle real time scenarios and address issues, if any, to deliver a robust and efficient product to the end users. Functional testing on the other hand ensures the validity of software as per the functional and business requirements. Read for more : what are performance tests

Webomates CQ, a tool by Webomates is used for performing regression testing for all the domains. Request a demo today.

Self-Healing — Automate the Automation

Introduction to The Test Automation Landscape…and Beyond

It’s no secret that Software Testing was always on the backseat during the traditional ways of development. Fast forward to 2020, and testing is right next to the development phase and even goes hand-in-hand. From assuming it as ‘low priority’, it’s now become the most important aspect of software development. From manual testing to automated testing to self-healing automated testing — It’s a journey from proscriptive to prescriptive.

Why Test Automation became so important

In an attempt to exempt testers from the time-consuming repetitive tasks, Automated testing came into existence and helped organizations achieve multiple business values like faster time to market, improved ROI and reduced testing cost and effort. The process involved an automated tool to execute a test case suite and generate detailed test reports.

However, as automation testing began to evolve, its popularity and ubiquity revealed some deficits. While the promise of automated testing was immense as it provided a greater testing efficiency, it had its associated risks from frequent changes made to the test scripts — ranging from failure of automated tests to test packages not being up-to-date. Real-time issue resolution was the need of the hour. And what better than the power combo of AI and ML to resolve this problem.

How the new age technologies — Agile, DevOps, AI and ML led to offset of Test Automation and onset of self-healing

With great power, comes great responsibility. As per World Quality Report, demands for quality-at-speed and shift-left have placed the onus of ensuring end-user satisfaction on quality assurance teams.

Imagine you are playing and you scrape your hand. Your body’s self healing mechanism kicks in and tries to heal the wound. Now, apply the same principle to software testing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines. Machine learning (ML) is the study of computer algorithms that improve automatically through experience. It is seen as a part of artificial intelligence. Read for more click here

If you are interested in learning more about Webomates’ CQ service please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com

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Uncovering the Meaning of Exploratory Testing

The first thing that comes to mind after hearing about ‘exploratory’ testing is adhoc testing. But there’s a difference between the two. Exploratory testing is a ‘thoughtful approach’ of testing that involves simultaneous learning, test schematizing, and test execution, unlike ad-hoc testing, which involves wandering through an application looking for bugs.

What is Exploratory Testing?

Exploring the software to discover its functionalities and drawbacks is what exploratory software testing does. So, this is a formal testing process that doesn’t rely on test cases or test planning documents to test the application. Instead, testers go through the application and learn about its functionalities. They then, use exploratory test charters to direct, record and keep track of the exploratory test session’s observations.

How do we go about the charter process?

Our charter process is conducted very meticulously by some of our best professionals.

• Identifying the purpose of the product:
• Once the primary purpose has been established, drawing a charter becomes exponentially simpler.
• Identify functions and areas of potential instability:
• It is quite likely that some of the functions within the project have a degree of instability. This can be quickly remedied by identifying potential pitfalls and solving them immediately.
• Creation of a charter for each function:
• Breaking down the project into smaller functions is the best way to formulate a comprehensive charter that prevents any mishaps.
• Execute Charter:
• We take great care to execute the planned charter.

We then proceed to design and record a consistency verification test.

Exploratory testing, as a process, includes the phases of discovery, investigation, and learning. The best way to go about it is to explicitly define and maintain test charters and record the observations within a conducted test. It is a hands-on procedure in which testers perform minimum planning and maximum test exploration.

Read More about : Exploratory testing services

If this has picked your interest and you want to know more, then please click here and schedule a demo, or reach out to us at info@webomates.com.

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