Testing & Quality in Continuous Delivery, DevOps, and Observability

In today’s fast-paced world, development and deployment must go hand in hand to ensure timely delivery without compromising on quality. To support this modern application development approach, continuous delivery is implemented, where the code changes are automatically prepared and deployed for production. But often, when the development and operations are not managed well can lead to failure in the production of the application. To resolve this issue, DevOps comes to the rescue, it eliminates the conflicts and creates the perfect environment for building sustainable applications.

Deploying DevOps models is an integral part of the process that accelerates software deliveries while assuring a high-quality deliverable. To streamline the entire process and understand the success or failure of the process, it is important to establish continuous monitoring and observability. The observability process allows to collect the metric and decide on the next actional steps to be taken. Hence, DevOps and observability are essential criteria when it comes to testing and maintaining quality in the continuous delivery pipeline.

DevOps test strategy: The need for continuous testing in continuous development

Organizations are adopting the DevOps approach to develop software that streamlines the entire software development and delivery lifecycle. DevOps strategy involves implementing agile practices of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to ensure an easy and efficient result. The introduction of continuous testing verifies the operational structure, detects errors early, and resolves conflicts as soon as it is identified.

The goal of CI/CD and the associated continuous testing process in the DevOps methodology is to evaluate and eventually improve the quality of the process. Here, the testing, operations, infrastructure, QA, DevOps, development, and testing are interconnected. The effectiveness of the final result depends on these parameters.

How implementing continuous testing helps in the continuous delivery pipeline

  • It helps detect defects earlier, which eventually allows the company in reduced cost and improve quality
  • Continuous testing in quicker deployment
  • The automated testing system helps reduce the manual effort and improves the consistency and accuracy of the end results considerably
  • Since the testing starts at the early stage, it ensures a better test coverage
  • With better coverage and accuracy, application-related risks can be mitigated quickly
  • The transparency of the test results helps the developers to improve the software by implementing different techniques

As a part of the testing strategy, organizations are also investing in good DevOps tools. Some famous DevOps tools can be version-controlled source code managers like GitHub, GitLab etc. Organizations can also consider CI/CD pipeline engines to validate and deploy the application to the end-user during the development lifecycle. Using integration and delivery tools are a great help to solve problems.

For example, Cloud environments allow using Cloud resources to automate the deployment. As-a-Service models like SaaS, PaaS, IaaS allow the set of required resources to flawlessly generate code, test the code, and maintain the code.

Monitoring the progress is also a significant part of the development cycle. The code creation and security checks are significant parts of monitoring.

The need for observability in the CI/CD pipelines

The evolution of workflows to CI/CD approach is carried out in the advanced DevOps environment has proven to improve the quality by multiple folds. However, as the advancement progresses, they get associated with a new set of challenges. In order to mitigate any known or unknown risks, it is important to carefully analyze and control the process. The analysis metrics will help the teams to measure the success rate; this is done by implementing Continuous Monitoring and Observability process.

Advantages of continuous monitoring and observability

Vulnerability checks: When a new code is introduced in the system, it is essential to check what security vulnerabilities it can cause. It is important to implement constant observability to check the way the code is performing, any data leaks, or unauthorized activities. Continuous monitoring and observability will have a check on all possible threats and keep the team prepared to mitigate any kind of risk.

Understanding future trends: By implementing constant monitoring and observability, the organization can analyze the infrastructural and operational gaps. The metrics will help the organization to understand the future scope and build a solution to resolve the issue.

Reviewing the analysis: Continuous monitoring and observability allows the developers to have an elaborate result of the working of the system. Any discrepancy can be easily identified during the general observability process and given an opportunity to fix them before deployment.

Long-term analysis process: A similar QA process may not be feasible for testing different workflow systems. Hence, we cannot conclude the working of a certain process as a success or failure. On implementing a continuous monitoring process over a longer period of time, the process can be reviewed based on the data.

Ways to implement monitoring and observability

By implementing Monitoring and Observability in the production environment, the following can be achieved.

  • Help in getting prior indications regarding service degradation or outage
  • Easily detect unauthorized activities and bugs to resolve at the earliest
  • Identification of long-term trends is crucial for an organization. Monitoring and observability help organizations to find trends for business purposes and planning
  • It will help the organization to know the unexpected side effects of new functionality or changes.

Why is Yethi your perfect QA partner?

To achieve long-term success, installing tools is not sufficient, you need new ideologies and continuous support to succeed. Yethi is your perfect QA partner for helping you achieve your business goals. Having helped more than 90 customers across 18+ countries, we have emerged as one of the leading QA service providers in the BFSI industry.

Our test automation platform, Tenjin, is a 5th generation robotic platform that has a simplistic plug and play design. It can offer high test coverage with an end-to-end testing approach, and is capable of testing even the complex software system with utmost ease. Tenjin supports end-to-end testing and offers detailed metrics with its TTM (Tenjin Testing Management) solution.