By leveraging Zephyr and creating new integrations, the company plans to provide Atlassian users with a native experience for their development activities.

According to the release, the new integration will enable test automation across UI, API, and data layers, as well as across a range of mobile devices and browsers.

The company also expanded its Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) capabilities with the introduction of a new Living Documentation Jira, which enables all team members to collaborate on projects more easily.

“We are excited to be following our acquisition of Zephyr so quickly to help Jira users extend their workflows,” said Justin Teague, CEO of SmartBear.

“With these new integrations, SmartBear continues to lead the way in software development and testing by being the first to provide a completely integrated test automation solution—extending the native Jira experience in Zephyr. This continues to highlight our belief in the Atlassian ecosystem and commitment to those 130,000 customers.”

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Atlassian also revealed that it has rebranded the AgileCraft business planning application that it acquired last month to ‘Jira Agile’.

Opsgenie

The software company also updated Opsgenie, the incident management solution it acquired in September, with new features, including a new incident timeline for tracking key events and response activities and post-mortem to help discover root causes and track remediation activities.

Opsgenie is also getting a new interface that aligns with the rest of Atlassian products so that user can easily work across Bitbucket, Jira and Jira Service Desk, using the same Atlassian identity system. A direct integration with Jira allows incidents to automatically trigger Jira tickets.

Atlassian’s Confluence Cloud collaboration software has also been revamped, with new features for creating visuals and better-organised content.

Atlassian acquisition

The company also announced it acquired Good Software, a company that creates analytic tools for Confluence users and admins.

They also announced significant performance and infrastructure enhancements to their self-managed enterprise offering, Atlassian Data Center. This year’s platform releases – Jira Software 8.0, Confluence 7.0, Bitbucket 6.0, Jira Service Desk 4.0, and Portfolio 3.0 – account for many of the upgrades.

Based on improvements made in Jira Software 8.0, advanced searches using Jira Query Language (JQL) are 31% faster on average, agile boards load 2x faster, and re-indexing times are now 71% faster.

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DevOps goes hand in hand with other well-known practices such as agile and continuous delivery. The need for DevOps arose from the increasing success of agile software development, as that led to organisations wanting to release their software faster and more frequently. DevOps and continuous delivery share a common background in agile methods and lean thinking: small and frequent changes with focused value to the end customer.

To facilitate DevOps we use automated tools for each and every part of the product development stages (code, build, test, package, release, configure and monitoring).

To help the DevOps pipeline in an organisation, many software delivery institutions have now embarked on test automation. With proper test automation tools and practices implemented we are able to test and deliver software with high quality. At the same time, there are a lot of repercussion and nightmares that organisations will face when undertaking a wrong test automation strategy.

Utilise test automation

We all deliver web solutions to our customers. Facebook, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are some of the leading software giants who deliver web-based solutions to billions of users worldwide. These solutions utilise web services and sometimes microservices architectures. Therefore, we embark first on the development of these web services before putting the final UI touches on the system. To facilitate faster delivery we should first automate the testing of such web services rather than waiting for the UI to be integrated into the delivery feature. We should use more web services test automation tools and test frameworks to extensively test web services and microservices architecture. It is a good practice to have more test coverage on web services rather than with a UI based functional test.

The more test issues we see at the foundation level more will be better off in the final stages of testing. These tests should look at testing the web service alone, test web services by integrating with other web services, and test against the contracts established. Web service testing can be automated with tools like RestAssured, Kataloon Studio, Postman and Karate. These are well-known tools in the industry. Web service testing should not limit to functional aspects. It should also be used for performance and security aspects. Tools like JMeter, Load UI and TestingWhiz can be used to test the performance of a web service.

Facilitate continuous delivery

In DevOps, we emphasise on continuous delivery. To facilitate continuous delivery we use continuous integration. Most of us do wrong when using continuous integration for test automation. We only push UI functional automation suite to the continuous integration. Where our automated regression will have to wait until the delivery of new option with UI. We should move away with such practice. The best way is to push our service level automated test into the continuous integration. This allows maximum leverage of our test automation practice. The automated security test at services level should also move into the CI process, which allows us to identify any security risks at earlier stages of development.

Use of the ‘behavioral driven development’ (BDD) approach is another area that also helps application development and automated test development. BDD facilitates creating development code as well as automated code, to what is actually required by the customer, thus eliminating any requirements gaps in delivery and also reworking. We should have a practice where we write automation scripts based on the scenarios (features) accepted by the customers. There are so many add-ons we can utilise for our test automation framework to facilitate BDD. Cucumber for Java and JavaScript, RSpec for Ruby and SpecFlow for .net are some of the add-ons that help this integration.

Codeless testing

We should have a test automation strategy to automate test quickly to keep in phase with the delivery pipeline. Rather than opting for tools that need extensive automation coding, it’s a good practice that we use tools that needs less coding or simply codeless. This helps us to reduce our effort on test automation and speed up the test process. Codeless test automation also helps non-technical quality assurance teams to get involved in test automation with no background in coding knowledge. If they know how to test, they can automate. To put codeless test automation into practice we can use test automation tools like Leap Test, Testim.io or TestCraft.

Machine learning and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) is also an area of focus today, as it will help the teams to bring down testing effort and speed up delivery with high quality. The AI-based test tool should be capable to come up with the test scenarios for a feature, with maximum coverage and design the test automation scripts for it, execute when necessary. There are two great AI automation tools available in the industry. Namely, Appvance IQ and Mabl. With Appvance you can create 1500 test cases in just 5 seconds; a dramatic improvement in testing.

Operating systems

To enhance our DevOps pipeline and to leverage the maximum of test automation we should also utilise the cloud-based testing solutions. These solutions enable us to test against a wider range of operating systems, mobile devices and even web browsers, which we cannot have in-house due to high investment and maintenance cost. Automated testing in such solutions helps to assure that the application delivered works on different platforms and environments. The solutions can utilise our BrowserStack, CrossBrowser Testing, Sauce Labs and Perfecto Cloud.

Another way we can help faster testing, and high-quality delivery is to use tools to help manual testers do more in-depth debugging, helping hunt down more hidden bugs. Tools like Postman and Fiddler helps us to debug web services more in a drill down fashion.

We should also keep in mind that our test automation suite should have the maximum code coverage of the application being tested. There should be more emphasis on code coverage tools like NCover, dotCover, Atlassian Clover and Cobertura. Looking at test automation code coverage helps us to ensure that our test automation code validates most parts of the application.

DevOps success

With DevOps, a test automation engineer’s role expands as they perform more of a developer role. They will have to create automated unit tests to test the developer code and they perform a test drive approach. Automated unit testing is another area where test engineers can embark upon. Therefore, the quality engineering team should work on TestNG, Junit, Mockito and Powermock.

So adding the final points, we need test automation to facilitate DevOps, as it’s a major contributor to DevOps success. So these tweaks that I have highlighted in this article serves a lot of DevOps practitioners around the world to put the ship safely to the sea and start cursing at maximum speeds.

Written by Senior QA Consultant at Virtusa, Kushan Shalindra Amarasiri

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Just-In-Time (JIT) Software delivery

DevOps has been borrowing concepts from the manufacturing industry to identify the bottlenecks in the software release process to make Just-In-Time (JIT) Software delivery. Combining the lean software practices with the JIT makes a powerful DevOps culture within the organisation.

goPaddle v3.0 covers application lifecycle management starting from release planning to production deployments, such that any bottlenecks in the application lifecycle can be identified & rectified through intelligent analytics. Release Pipelines provide the workflow automation for continuous build, integration and deployment across different stages of the lifecycle. Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) or Atlassian Jira users can now link their release or project plans with goPaddle, onboard an application from an existing source control repository, build a release pipeline and measure the release effectiveness over a period of time. This comes along with the portability benefit as well. goPaddle packages the applications as Docker containers, thus applications built once using goPaddle can be deployed on AWS, Google or Azure Cloud. In case of Azure, goPaddle goes one step further to support portable deployments across Docker Swarm or Kubernetes.

Google and Azure developers

goPaddle provides a seamless experience to Google & Azure Developers by allowing Single-Sign-On using existing cloud accounts and provide a single- command line tool helps to provision scalable Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

The concept of “Bring Your Own Infrastructure” and the “Build Once Deploy Anywhere” completely alleviates vendor lock-in at every level.

Technology companies like Offshore Development Centres (ODC), BFSI, FinTech and e-commerce companies can take advantage of this platform for streamlining and automating their end-to-end application lifecycle management. For developers and growing businesses, the platform is available as hosted subscription model. Developer license gives a lifetime free subscription to use the platform and as the team size increases, the teams can leverage the pay-as-you-grow model. For large enterprises, the solution is available as an on-premise edition with perpetual license, training and enterprise SLAs.

Edited from press release by Jordan Platt

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Instantaneous face to face teamwork isn’t always possible. Tightening travel budgets, awareness of the environmental impact of air miles and the increase of IT teams operating in globally dispersed markets mean that more companies are turning to video conferencing as an alternative to time-consuming and costly travel. Innovations in video conferencing now provide easy, simple group video chat – meaning proper group collaboration amongst IT teams. In an IT environment, collaboration can mean the difference between spotting a missing line of code, developing a patch together or creating an easier way to complete a process. The opportunities for team members to learn from each other are increased if people can see their colleagues and what they’re doing.

While it is the answer for many dispersed environments, the traditional video conference, cumbersome and difficult to scale in a work context, is in decline. There is an increase in research which shows its slow death: The dedicated system segment, the backbone of the video conferencing market, declined 6% in Q1 2016, and the global enterprise video market was down 4% in 2015 from 2014, dragged by PBX-based and dedicated systems.

Boosting productivity

The very technology which is meant to help boost productivity is what is slowing down collaboration. Clunky systems – which require time and effort to install downloads, fix errors and update software – are causing frustration among IT teams and users alike.

But the difficulties lie in the methods used, not the concept of video collaboration itself. In fact, Wainhouse Research found that 94% of employees say that group video conferencing results in higher efficiency and productivity, compared to other forms of communication. A Harvard Business Review study that looked at people’s habits on non-video conference calls highlights why productive teams are turning to video to collaborate. When teams collaborate over the phone, as opposed to the screen, 65% of respondents admitted multi-tasking, 44% sent text messages, and 43% checked social media sites. More shockingly, over a quarter (27%) of respondents have fallen asleep on a conference call! In contrast to this, video calls resulted in only 4% of respondents multitasking, according to another study referenced here.

Not only does video chat boost productivity, it also disseminates company culture across borders. If the culture is one of collaboration and inclusion, employees often embrace it with open arms. Video is one more way to break down the barriers that separate teammates geographically and bridge the gaps in communication that slow work down. Teamwork and collaboration, be it in person or over group video, allow for better brainstorming and problem-solving, contextual learning, and the bolstering of skill sets.

Supporting global teams

The modern methods for instant group video chat allow teams to make decisions faster, with less friction. It’s the virtual version of spinning your chair around to brainstorm an idea – but with colleagues who work across the room or across the globe. IT teams are in prime position to implement video chat in order to boost collaboration. This, in turn, should lead to more productive staff who can collectively solve problems quickly and are motivated in their jobs.

Clearly, the business case for modern, simple video chat is strong: managers will like to know calls are efficient and leading to optimised collaboration. Wasting time working through issues with old technology should be a thing of the past.

Edited for web by Cecilia Rehn.

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