Best Practices for DevOps Testing

Automation is a critical component of a successful DevOps deployment. It’s not enough to automate the various phases and have one phase successfully trigger the next one. In fact, we need to implement automation even inside a phase.

Test automation

As developers check in the code, the build must be triggered automatically and should run all the unit tests as part of build execution. The build must fail if any of the unit test cases fail.

• The essential prerequisite of automating a test is a well-defined customer requirement. With vaguely defined requirements, it’s tough for developers to determine which test cases must pass and which must fail.

• Many organizations usually face a common issue of resistance to change, mainly when the developers are asked to write test cases before developing the code. Incorporating the TDD mindset into a project is not a trivial task.

• We can overcome this challenge by cross-skilling the developers and empowering them to write practical unit tests that add value to the delivery pipeline.

• As developers start writing multiple automated tests, they also need to pay attention to identifying opportunities to run them in parallel to improve the build speed. Some tests are not worth automating, especially if they add complexity and time to the build.

• Another often overlooked issue is a test environment whose configurations are not similar to the production environment.

• This problem will be addressed once we use scripts to provision the infrastructure. We can ensure the configuration is consistent by running the same scripts across multiple environments.