November 2017 Summaries

To achieve faster releases and improve quality, organizations need to adopt a culture of automation across Dev, QA, and Ops teams. This requires balancing speed and quality, committing to automation, and leveraging tools like Jenkins, CloudFormation, Spinnaker, and AWS CodePipeline. Automation can help reduce manual errors, provide feedback at every step of the process, and bring speed that would not be possible with human intervention. By thinking about automation in terms of a trigger-and-response model, teams can create a robust pipeline that supports high-quality apps shipped faster. A culture of automation across all teams is critical to achieving the promise of DevOps, which transforms testing efforts and leads to better quality apps.

Containers are being used to test functional applications, but this approach may not be suitable due to limitations such as lack of GUI support and disparate infrastructure requirements. Containers were designed for size, portability, immutability, and ease of deployment, not testing. Using containers for testing can introduce more work or limit the breadth and depth of testing. However, containers are impacting application architectures, especially in microservice-based environments, and changing how applications are deployed and tested. Quality Engineering should be aware of these changes and consider deferring testing infrastructure to cloud-based testing grids, focusing on decreasing test effort and increasing test suite depth and breadth.

Agile software testing requires a structured approach to ensure quality and organizational communication. An agile process playbook for software testing is essential to include QA in the conversation from the beginning of the discovery stage, fostering a shift in mindset and culture. The playbook should cover key stages such as research, technology analysis, requirements definition, and deployment planning, ensuring collaboration, quality strategy approval, and continuous testing. By involving QA early on, teams can improve speed, efficiency, ownership, and collaboration, ultimately leading to better quality software.