3 Challenges of Implementing DevOps Testing & How To Deal With Them

“The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.” – Jean-Baptiste Poquelin

DevOps is a revolution, and a cultural one at that. According to renowned COO’s globally, the biggest challenge for a company that intends to adopt DevOps testing can be classified into two areas, namely, the developers need to take more responsibility for production systems, and the operations team may need to learn to code!

Apart from cultural issues, DevOps posts a challenge to the entire organization in the way it thinks of creating and launching a software solution or product. With an increased visibility of software defects, and the impact it can have on our day-to-day lives, it has become obvious that software testing plays a very crucial role.

In this blog, we look into the key areas that a business must pay attention to, while implementing DevOps testing.

Resource Management

Good resource management is a very important aspect for a successful implementation of DevOps. In an agile testing environment like DevOps, you need a good mix of different skill sets to complement each other on the same project. For example, you would need a test resource capable of defining unclear scenarios and test cases; someone to write the automated regression test and execute the package. As the project progresses, there may be requirements for resources with specialist skills in integration and performance testing. Therefore, it is important that you get the right mix of specialists to plan, research and execute a project perfectly. The challenge however is to source a resource with multiple skills, and allocate adequate number of projects to increase ROI.

Tools Management

Right tools for the right job; that’s what it comes down to. It is easy to get lost in the heap of tools available these days. There are open-source tools offered on a trial basis and these can be implemented without much internal oversight. But in the long run, this has the potential to cause problems. Apart from that, if you are looking at agile automation testing, you cannot use traditional testing tools because this will mean that you have to wait till the software is complete thus failing the entire purpose of DevOps. If you try to use traditional automation tools for agile testing you will find that the problems are not resolved fully. On the other hand, in some cases implementing right at the beginning of a project may not be feasible. You may have to wait till the time where the system has evolved and settled if you want the test automation deployment to reap good results. So the challenge is to ensure that the right testing tools are selected and deployed at the right time in the process.

Cost Efficiency

The cost factor is another major challenge. We all know that implementing DevOps in itself requires a considerable investment of financial resources on infrastructure, tools, and other resources. As important as all these considerations are, ROI is also a crucial factor. If DevOps test automation is not up to the mark, keeping in mind the various factors included in a testing environment, (we have just discussed two challenges related to testing factors above) it will increase the overall project cost, and a delay in deployment will also severely affect the ROI.

So these are the three typical challenges facing DevOps testing. However, these can be overcome by developing the DevOps culture of good communication and integration between the development and operations team.

Challenges are inevitable. So, if you are facing a unique challenge with regard to DevOps testing, contact our team of specialists, and let us help you.