The state of software development is evolving rapidly as software developers and testers have started moving to DevOps. In the beginning, organizations used to have a simple process for development and operations, but now users demand a more enhanced and improved experience with every product, which requires proper testing, security, data, AI, and more.

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Many enterprises are still striving to cope up with DevOps, but the ongoing changes in software development are making it more challenging for businesses to continue with it. Considering the current innovations in the software development industry, chances are that current software development strategies might ambush soon.

What is DevOps?

DevOps allows businesses to improve collaboration and productivity between the developers and operations teams by automating the infrastructure, workflows, and continuously measuring the application’s performance. With DevOps, developers can write code in small chunks so that they can be integrated, tested, monitored, and deployed within a few hours, making the development process faster.

DevOps integration allows software teams to improve the occurrence of deployments and decrease deploying time for new code. It offers an iterative approach to monitor, measure, and improve the software product on a regular basis. And to verify that the updated code is working correctly, continuous testing came into existence.

You might wonder why there is a need for continuous testing after testing a project thoroughly. But continuous testing is one of the critical factors in the success of your website or application. In fact, it is considered an extensive approach to automation testing. On the other hand, many organizations largely focus on advanced application development procedures and DevOps implementations to optimize performance.

In short, continuous testing helps in filling the breaches between developers and testers. So, when developers complete their work like updating the code, they pass it to testers. Testers then verify the code, and if any bugs are found in it, they send it back to developers. This process keeps going on until the product is ready to be published. But, continuous testing has a few drawbacks that make it complicated to execute, such as the fact that it is not easy to automate testing for updated features, and automation becomes susceptible if the code is updated frequently. Thus, to overcome these challenges, DevOps introduced DevTestOps.

What is DevTestOps? And How it is Helpful?

DevTestOps allows developers, testers, and operation engineers to work together in a similar environment. Apart from running test cases, DevTestOps also involves writing test scripts, automation, manual, and exploratory testing.

In the past few years, DevOps and automation testing strategies have received a lot of appreciation because teams were able to develop and deliver products in the minimum time possible. But, many organizations soon realized that without continuous testing, DevOps provide an incomplete delivery of software that might be full of bugs and issues. And that’s why DevTestOps was introduced.

Now, DevTestOps is growing in popularity because it improves the relationship between the team members involved in a software development process. It not only helps in faster delivery of products but also provides high-quality software. And when the software is released, automated test cases are already stored in it for future releases.

Implementing DevTestOps

It’s not that simple to implement DevTestOps, but it shouldn't be too complicated, either. Your team needs a proper systematic procedure in place to start the DevTestOps implementation. There are a few other things required for implementing DevTestOps, such as:

• A reliable test automation system with enclosing testers in the development team

• Proper collaboration with the product team to understand the product thoroughly

• Client’s necessities must be satisfied by prioritizing the work

• Avoiding conflicts between the developer’s point of view and the client’s needs

• The best contributions of every team member in their assigned roles

• Developers need to change their mindset and style of working according to client’s needs because they will be responsible for testing their code

• Testers need to perform as experts

In simple words, every team member must adopt new ways of working because DevTestOps involves testing at every stage of software development. Security is another critical requirement for the software that should be implemented properly. DevSecOps is often used to provide further security to the development process.

What is DevSecOps, and How It Is Helpful?

We simply cannot ignore the fact that adding security is the most complicated feature in any software development process. Earlier, the security for a product was executed at the final stage of development, and it was only limited to specific team members. This happened because earlier software projects were delivered in months or years, but now they are delivered within a few weeks, which requires the security feature to be implemented in the initial stage of development.

As we are talking about DevOps, which provides a collaborative approach to development, security also becomes the primary responsibility for every team member. Thus, DevSecOps is a combination of development, security, and operations, which introduces some security tools to make the process automated.

DevSecOps helps in providing complete security for your application as well as the infrastructure from the initial stage of development. It has an in-built security feature that makes it more reliable and robust. In simple language, we can say that DevSecOps fills the potential gaps and make an application leak-proof by regular monitoring and risk assessment.

Why Automate DevTestOps and DevSecOps?

We all know DevOps is idealistic and unrealistic without automation. The flexibility and performance that you need from it cannot be delivered manually. It is not that simple to perform continuous testing or monitoring with manual approaches. That’s why automation needs to be integrated with DevTestOps and DevSecOps.

The need for continuous delivery and continuous integration has made quality assurance very complicated, as they need to be implemented at each stage of the development cycle. By using automation, organizations can improve their continuous integration process and deliver products quickly as per user expectations.

Moreover, enterprises are using data-driven methodologies, and artificial intelligence is becoming a part of software development slowly, so DataOps and AIOps will become the forthcoming standards of DevOps soon.

The advancement in automation technologies has helped businesses adopt new agile approaches for their business growth. For example, automated cross-browser testing tools have made it easier for organizations to test their web app across a variety of browsers, browser versions, OS, and devices, which help them deliver the product continuously. Additionally, technologies like containers and microservices are essential parts of DevOps security and initiatives.

But, to fully leverage the power of DevTestOps and DevSecOps, it is necessary to have a dedicated DevOps team, which every organization doesn’t have at present. 

Conclusion

The theory behind DevTestOps and DevSecOps might be cleared to you after reading the above information. Now, you can analyze whether implementing these techniques in your software development cycle will be helpful or not. In our opinion, we believe DevTestOps and DevSecOps are going to be the new buzz words in the software development field because they add value to DevOps and help your business grow rapidly. 

Further Reading

DevTestOps Helps Overcome Continuous Testing Challenges

Key Findings from the 2019 DevTestOps Landscape Report