The concept of DevOps has become a buzzword in recent years, with many organisations unsure of its actual meaning. DevOps, the combination of development teams and operations teams, became necessary the moment SaaS (software-as-a-service) was born.

SaaS meant that development teams delivered software to their own operations teams rather than to customers, but often the operations team would say that the product wasn’t fit-for-production, and too often a stubborn deadlock would result in which the customer and the company as a whole were the losers.

The development team believed that the product needed to change, whereas the operations team thought that the web server environment was the issue.

As a result, the purpose of DevOps was originally to make both the development and operations team communicate with each other. This reached an arguably historical moment, at the realisation that DevOpps not only should be, but needed to be automated through the deployment process. Today, the name DevOps has become synonymous with two phrases:

Continuous delivery – DevOps is all about delivering new value to users faster (and collaboration between development and operations is central to this).

Automation – When organisations delivered products to customers every few months the build-test-package-deploy process could be manual (even though best-practice said it should be automated). But continuous delivery, where new versions are released several times a day, the process simply must be automated.

Speed over service

When organisations talk about DevOps, the first adjective that springs to mind is ‘fast’. It’s all about speed. Because of this, automation is essential: several hundred manual tests per day would be nothing short of impossible.

In light of this, DevOps teams can naturally become very inwards facing, reducing their emphasis on user experience in the process. The team is likely to focus on their own processes rather than the issues that the customers are facing, focusing on compliance rather than user-centric testing.

To tackle this, organisations often create another team that immediately succeeds the DevOps team, specialising in user testing and the customer experience. In Digital Enterprises (for example, retail and banking) this new team typically lives under the chief digital officer rather than the chief information officer.

Achieving a balance between focusing inwards and outwards takes a while to perfect — often between one or two years — but the benefits are worth it.

Too many cooks

Since the development and operations team joined to create DevOps, some organisations have eliminated roles to create an ‘everyone is everything’ structure. This in itself can be a leadership challenge, although in theory it’s great for employees to take on multiple roles.

However, it also means that employees perfectly qualified for one role are also assigned to a completely unsuitable one, and are expected to complete that role well. This can lead to some tasks being near impractical for certain team members, severely lowering productivity.

The problem with leaders believing that everyone has to be doing the same role is that instead of creating cross-functional teams, the entire team often becomes focussed on the function most people are skilled at (which is typically development since ‘DevOps’ usually grows out of ‘Agile’ change projects).

To tackle this, DevOps teams need to be genuinely cross-functional teams which include people with different skills and strengths just like a great sports team does. DevOps teams shouldn’t be a group of people focussed in one function suddenly given responsibility for all functions.

Putting DevOps to the test

Alongside ensuring that DevOps teams are using their individual strengths and are concerned about customer requirements, the testing process can also be challenged. Organisations often need to test processes that teams don’t have, so they must build them first.

This takes a considerable amount of time, which slows down the testing process. However, these tests rarely solve much larger organisational problems.

What’s missing in several organisations is a separate group of testers that conduct the test alongside the ‘rapid smoke’ tests. These are important in an organisation, since you can’t gauge user experience from 20 minutes of repression tests.

A brighter future for DevOps

With DevOps teams deploying numerous processes every hour, organisations need to automate their testing to ensure that all of the processes that are created are also tested, and are tested to a high standard. DevOps may be an unclear buzzword for many organisations, but understanding the importance of keeping roles separate, while focusing on the customer, can allow testing to flourish.

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LogiGear’s goal was to grasp attitudes regarding DevOps, to understand testing professionals’ strategies, and to look at the financial tool chain commitments that requires culture change, planning and training.

The survey findings show that 60% of respondents that use DevOps are under a lot of pressure, with 46% that don’t use DevOps saying there is a lot more pressure to automate.

Since adopting DevOps, 60% of participants are finishing more tests, 32% of developers are conducting more tests, and nearly 50% of respondents using DevOps revealed that they have a lot of test data problems, with the group that doesn’t use DevOps having fewer issues.

Continuous delivery adoption

“DevOps can be a big disruptor, bringing with it a new manner of working, a new set of tools. What most teams want is a smooth running software development pipeline and with DevOps that can take time,” said Michael Hackett, Senior Vice President at LogiGear.

“In fact, at LogiGear we have stopped using the phrase DevOps, and now instead use continuous delivery. There are many reasons for this. First, continuous delivery eliminates the visualisation of the big issues that come to mind when thinking of the term DevOps. Second, it seems continuous delivery is what software teams really need. Our survey brings insight into the big issues and roadblocks surrounding continuous delivery adoption,” added Hackett.

Only 33% of respondents said that their agile and scrum practices are going well, despite not using DevOps.

“Agile and scrum were concrete processes that led to tangible and positive results in the workplace. On the other hand, I have yet to understand the term ‘DevOps’ except as a meaningless buzzword that has had zero effect to our work processes,” said a survey participant.

The survey findings conclude that more teams that practice DevOps will continue to improve through communication, information and training.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

The post DevOps is a ‘meaningless buzzword’ finds report appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The software world has undergone a revolution during the last decade as a result of the Cloud, consumerization, DevOps, IoT and micro-services architectures to name a few. Consequently, digital teams are struggling to deliver high-quality digital experiences that delight users in a way that is fast and efficient.

These changes have broken the established assumptions and foundations around traditional testing approaches and outlined that a new approach to testing; and most critically test automation; is needed in order to thrive in a digital world.

“The performance of a product is the most important factor influencing user experience. If you don’t get it right it will negatively impact user adoption, conversion, retention and ultimately revenue generation. Put simply, performance is user experience,” commented TestPlant CTO Antony Edwards.

He added: “At TestPlant we believe that the current standard approach to performance testing is fundamentally flawed and that this is having a huge negative impact on both the user-experience of digital services and IT teams’ ability to keep up with continuous delivery and DevOps.

“Whether it’s mobile app or IoT device usage, web page stickiness, or enterprise application adoption you are trying to achieve, testing teams must learn new approaches to ensure app responsiveness. We need a truly integrated approach that includes testing the impact of every interaction, focusing on the user experience.”

Based on its industry experience and knowledge across a range of industries from banking to aerospace, TestPlant developed five principles which have become the foundation for delivering high-quality ‘digital user experiences’ for users in a way that is fast and efficient.

The TestPlant focus for testing is:

1. Test through the eyes of the user
2. Test all aspects of the user experience
3. Monitoring is testing
4. Extend automation and analytics beyond test execution
5. Report test status in terms of the user experience

By applying this new approach to performance testing you:

• Get a true understanding of the real user experience
• Make performance testing far more accessible to non-experts
• Accelerate performance testing significantly so that you can keep up with DevOps
• Enable a coherent performance testing strategy pre-production and post-production

“The goal of this new approach is about delivering a better user experience to drive customer adoption, conversion, retention, and of course revenue,” added Edwards.

If you want to find out more about performance testing in a digital world then you can join the TestPlant webinar on Thursday 29 June. In this session attendees will take a deep-dive into performance testing and showcase TestPlant’s new approach.

• How poorly integrated performance testing approaches impact user engagement and usageDiscover why and how the user needs to be at the centre of your performance testing approaches:
• How to avoid losing sight of the end-users and focus instead on their experience as the best proxy for performance
• How testers are the most important user experience designers in your company

If you want to find out more about performance testing in a digital world then you can join the TestPlant webinar on Thursday 29 June.

Written by Andrew Holt

The post Five steps to user centric performance testing appeared first on DevOps Online North America.