QAOps: What is it? How Important is it?

Artem Golubev

While many modern software teams are practicing DevOps these days, a smaller fraction have embraced QAOps with the same level of emphasis. Any team not practicing QAOps is missing out on substantial organizational gains – so it’s vital for your team to use QAOps if you want to get the most from your quality assurance process. Let’s find out what issues QAOps solves and what you will gain by implementing these practices within your company.

What is QAOps?

QAOps is the practice of integrating QA into the software delivery pipeline, usually in a CI/CD model with continuous testing. At a more granular level, QAOps usually involves integrating QA processes, automation, and reporting into the software development lifecycle.

What Organizations is QAOps Best Suited for? How Important is it?

QAOps is most beneficial in Agile environments with frequent software releases. We typically see them implemented in mid-size companies and enterprises that become troubled with the speed of software delivery due to too many moving parts, and at the same time, have enough resources to build these pipelines. These practices benefit any software team that wants to streamline the QA process to maximize efficiency and speed while maintaining quality. 

• QA team members are empowered to understand requirements earlier, cover them with test cases, identify problems faster, and overall help ensure quality in the software starting earlier in the SDLC
• Collaboration between QA, developers, and other team members is enhanced, leading to improved communication, improved accuracy of testing, and minimized defect escape rate
• Faster, higher quality release cycles result in faster delivery of value to the market and a better customer experience
• Fewer bottlenecks and improved scalability of process by removing inefficiencies

How Can Your Team Leverage QAOps?

There are some common strategies and methods for implementing QAOps that your team can leverage to start improving QA processes, SDLC and STLC.

• Automated testing lends itself strongly to QAOps, and has become a foundational staple of teams using continuous integration and continuous delivery of software. By leveraging automated testing in between CI and CD, the QA team can ensure that testing is as streamlined as possible.
• QA has to be involved in the development process starting from the requirements stage, building test plans and test cases to ensure they hit the ground running when each particular software piece becomes available for testing.
• It’s also essential not to forget about the foundational pillar of the testing pyramid, unit testing. Each new feature ought to be covered with unit tests.
• Smoke testing is another part of the automated testing process that fits into the practice of QAOps, running on every build to ensure a basic level of quality across the software each and every time there is a deployment.
• Regression testing is the next stage, where a complete set of test cases is executed to ensure that no bugs were introduced to existing code while adding new features or fixing bugs.
• Parallel testing can be used to support QAOps, running multiple test processes at the same time to reduce bottlenecks in the test execution process.
• Scalability testing also lends itself to QAOps by ensuring testing scales as the software does, and also ensuring the software performs as needed at scale.
• (Optional) Performance testing helps to boost confidence that the end users won’t be disturbed by a significant slowdown after any particular deployment to a production environment.

Which Tools Can Help You Enable QAOps?

As we’ve discussed, QAOps is essentially impossible without automated testing. At the same time, not all automated testing frameworks are created the same way, and covering new features with end-to-end tests has proven to be a very challenging task. That is how testRigor plays its major role in the success of the company – by empowering anyone on the team to build even lengthy and complex automated tests using only simple English commands.

By leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate and scale the QA testing process, testRigor is becoming an increasingly prominent tool of choice for teams practicing QAOps, because it lends itself so naturally to the goals of QAOps. Seamlessly integrate your tests into the CI pipeline and enjoy the benefits. Automated tests created with testRigor are so stable that some companies even use them for monitoring! If you’re interested in learning more about how testRigor can help your team implement a successful QAOps process within your organization, feel free to reach out to us. One of our friendly testing experts will be happy to help you get the information you need.