[DZone Research] Automated Testing and DevOps

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the DZone Guide to Automated Testing: Your End-to-End Ecosystem. 

Introduction

For this year's Automated Testing Guide Survey, we received 821 responses with a 64% completion rate. Based on these responses, we've compiled a quick article on the DevOps trends, outside of testing, that respondents are using, and how they fit into the automated testing picture. 

Continuing the DevOps Trend

As automated testing is a component of larger DevOps trends, we asked our community what other DevOps practices they have adopted. Surprisingly, only 48% reported having a designated DevOps team in their organization. Despite this lower-than-expected number, the percentage of DevOps teams who automate their integration tests increased from 49% in our 2017 survey to 57% this year. Additionally, the percentages of organizations with DevOps teams who have automated their component and performance tests rose from 51% in 2017 to 53% for component tests and 55% for performance tests in this year's survey.

Test-driven development and CI/CD were some other popular DevOps methodologies reported in this survey. 64% of respondents work for organizations that have implemented TDD in some capacity, with 36% saying they only use TDD at certain times during the development process. The biggest benefits reported from TDD were improved code quality (77%), less time spent debugging (60%), and easily maintainable code (46%). Additionally, 59% of respondents believe their organization has achieved Continuous Delivery to some degree, and 65% said their organization has achieved Continuous Integration for at least some projects.

Conclusion

Developer teams continue to automate their TDD tests in order to make TDD a "seamless part of the developer workflow." (Parasoft, "How Can Test-Driven Development (TDD) Be Automated?"). This automation of TDD allows development teams to remove the monotony from testing, as well as ensure that proper testing practices maintained. (Parasoft, "How Can Test-Driven Development (TDD) Be Automated?") Both of these factors lead to higher code quality. 

As organizations continue to embrace DevOps, automating tools outside of test suites, and implementing these automated tools in the CI/CD process, will lead to better code, faster tests, and less stress on developers. 

This article is part of the Key Research Findings from the DZone Guide to Automated Testing: Your End-to-End Ecosystem.