DevOps and Quality Assurance

A recent article in Techwell highlighted two interesting points for DevOps and Quality Assurance.

The main problems seem to be included in the following paragraph from the article:

‘One problem with this approach is that the business sometimes cannot handle changes so rapidly. The other problem is that too often, the QA and testing team cannot keep up with the need to verify and validate changes. DevOps may be able to deliver changes to production, but the rest of the team may not be able to handle continuous deployments. Improving the QA and testing function can help deal with these challenges and enable organizations to effectively handle the impact of continuous delivery and continuous deployment.’

The first question is in the initial sentence. Can the business handle the rapid changes? The better question to ask is whether the business actually wants the rapid changes in the first place. If they express the need for the changes and agree to the timetable for their delivery then they would be expected to put the resources and allocate the time to learn and utlise the changes as they arrive. An assessment of the ability of the business to absorb the rapid pace of change and a subsequent prioritisation of the order of changes would reduce this problem substantially.

If the business expresses the desire for all the changes and states that the delivery schedule is necessary then we come to the second problem – the ability of Quality Assurance and Software Testing to deliver. As a recent comment on LinkedIn put it “Are you sure it is testing you are doing” or it might be better worded as “Are you sure it is testing you should be doing?”. It might be better to check items earlier and determine what is necessary rather than assuming that Testing is all that is required. Quality Assurance carries out that assessment.