What is DevOps?
DevOps applies Agile practices to QA and Ops teams, thus streamlining build, validation, deployment, and development of software. It prioritizes integration, collaboration, and automation between Dev and Ops teams. It also improves predictability, efficiency, and security in the software development lifecycle.
Why is DevOps needed?
DevOps offers the following advantages
- Provides greater control over the production environment to developers
- Improves the frequency of deployment
- Lowers failure rate of new software releases
- Improves mean time to recovery
- Increases speed and quality of released software
- Achieves faster time to market
There are four components of DevOps.
Continuous Integration (CI): A practice that involves regular integration of code changes to a shared code repository. This practice prioritizes committing small code changes frequently rather than infrequent big changes.
Continuous Delivery (CD): After Continuous Integration comes Continuous Delivery. This practice pushes the code build in the Continuous Integration stage into production. This process also includes filtering the code through various stages — QA, Staging, Production, and the like.
Continuous Testing: From the CI stage, a number of tests need to be conducted for proper validation of code and integrating it with the existing codebase. This is mandatory to ensure that the software works according to requirements and is not disrupted by bugs or anomalies.
Automation testing is necessary for successfully executing this stage.
Continuous Monitoring: While code is being deployed via the CI/CD pipeline to the production environment, the Ops team will have to constantly monitor the environment to ensure positive levels of uptime, stability, and availability. This is Continuous Monitoring.
Best Practices for DevOps
- When automation is possible, do it. The right CI/CD tools are instrumental in creating an effective DevOps system. Find a testing service offering integrations with popular CI/CD tools. Look for a cloud Selenium grid with real browsers and devices for testing. There should also be in-built debugging tools that let testers identify and resolve bugs immediately.
- Run tests on all code without failure, be it manual or automated testing (ideally, both).
- Stay up to date with current technology trends.
- Deliver software quickly. When required, roll back software equally quickly.
DevOps saves time, conserves human effort, and ensures high product quality. This means that user experience remains pristine, without the users having to wait weeks or months for it.
