Importance of Learning DevOps for Testers

For any person working for a software project, it is crucial to keep adding new skills in your resume with the fast-changing technologies. Tester is an important role in any software development life cycle, but just being a manual tester or an automation tester isn’t enough. As a tester, you should not only know the different types of testing but you should also keep on learning new technical skills. One such skill that is quickly becoming popular among testers is DevOps.

As the name suggests, DevOps is a combination of development (which represents ‘Dev’ in DevOps) and operations (which represents ‘Ops’ in DevOps). DevOps approach encourages the participation of both the development team and operations team in order to provide high quality and reliable software. 

In this approach, the development team and the operations team work together in all the phases of the software development. DevOps also helps in reducing the development time as timely and regular feedbacks are provided by the operations team.

Let’s Look at Some of the Major Benefits of Having DevOps as an Approach for Software Development:

• Products developed using the DevOps approach have higher quality as the development and testing process go hand in hand. Everyone involved in the project focuses on the quality and improving the product as much as possible.

• DevOps approach involves various teams of the organization to work together. Earlier in traditional software development, development and testing teams used to work separately communicating with other organization departments only for requirements or for UAT. Now, as the operations team is also included in the development process, they can give their feedback whenever required which reduces bugs and eventually increases the satisfaction of both development and the operations teams.

• DevOps approach encourages the use of automation for testing which helps the developers and testers in launching a new feature quickly. Quick delivery also results in customer satisfaction.

Based on the above discussion, we can understand the importance of DevOps and why it is becoming more and more popular nowadays. 

Let’s Discuss Some of the Benefits That a Tester Can Get by Being Part of a DevOps Software Development:

• In the DevOps approach, the tester will be involved from the beginning of the software development i.e. from the requirements discussions. This early involvement gives the tester a deep idea about the requirements and helps him/her in designing test cases.

• In other software development methods, testers usually come into the picture only after the code has been deployed on the QA environment and they don’t really communicate with other external entities much. In this approach, a tester gets to work with different organization teams such as the operations team. Here, even their involvement with the development team will be huge compared to other software development methodologies.

• A tester needs to move out of the bubble of manual testing and needs to master the automation tools. S/he needs to get familiar with the end to end CI/CD solutions. This change will give the tester an opportunity to learn some new skills.

• As mentioned in the above points, this role comes with more responsibilities which in turn will give the tester an increased value in the organization. 

• As this is a very challenging job that requires building test strategy, learning new technical skills, generating quick results, thinking like an end-user among many others, it will eventually lead to high growth in terms of both salary and skills.