By Bala Ethirajalu.
Traditionally testing and operations are two different things carried out in isolation with an imaginary wall between them. Testing is done on one side, and once complete, the testers effectively throw the delivery over the fence to the operations team who deploy it into production.
As a result, no one is accountable for the high quality end-to-end process, from requirement, through development and testing, into production. Failure to combine these activities leads to an extended time-to-market, higher costs and an increased likelihood of defects being found once the programme is in production.
Without the knowledge of the production environment, testing will always be some way short of where it needs to be. As a result, more defects are likely to slip through the testing net and only be found once in production.
There is also a concern that a testing team that doesn’t have the knowledge of the production stage, will not be able to think of all the necessary scenarios that need to be tested.
In order to address these issues, Brickendon advocates a TestOps approach, which combines the worlds of testing and operations to showcase what is currently seen as the standard of best practice for technology testing, and is being adopted by technology leaders.
TestOps means that there are no walls, gates or transitions between testing and operations. The two processes are integrated into a single entity aimed at producing the best software system as quickly and efficiently as possible and the key is ownership and accountability. The client knows they have a team who is accountable for the quality assurance of the whole process from end-to-end: requirements, through development, testing and into production. The end result is much more efficient and effective.
Adopting this approach to the testing process will remove most of the disadvantages associated with traditional testing, in particular:
Higher Quality at Lower Cost – The net long-term costs are likely to fall as a result of:
Faster Time to Market – Faster Releases and development of standardised and reusable automated tests, which allow the capability for development teams to run automated testing and validate code as they are developing. Hence, it reduces the SIT/UAT timeline.
Lower Business & Reputational Risk – Reputational Risk and business risk reduced by:
By adopting this approach, banks and other financial institutions can save themselves considerable amounts of time and money and rest assured that the testing is of a highly superior quality because the whole testing team is fully aware of what is happening at each stage.
Another advantage to this approach is the ability to divide releases into modules, meaning that sections of the programme can be tested and released into production in stages, giving less opportunity for error. The traditional approach is always bigger releases and the bigger the release, the more risk you carry.
At Brickendon we have experts who can transfer the process from traditional testing to TestOps in stages. For more information on how using Brickendon’s TestOps approach can benefit your business, contact [email protected]