Sunday, December 3, 2017

DevOps Automation For Faster And Continuous Product Release

By Janet Jackson


DevOps can aptly be defined as a methodology, philosophy or ideology. Its principle stands at narrowing the gap between the Development (Dev) and the Operations (Ops) teams. In other words, it is a methodology that includes Dev and Ops coordination that leads to a streamlined flow of work to deliver faster and at the same time high-quality software. DevOps Automation facilitates continuous delivery wherein the deployments can be done as and when required on demand.

It further requires enterprises to facilitate constant communication and collaboration among programmers, testers, and operation staff. The practitioners further need to use specialized tools to unify development, QA, and operations smoothly. At the same time, an enterprise also has to focus specifically on implementing it testing to evaluate the quality of the software from the planning phase to deployment phase of the project. Hence, each enterprise has to focus on many factors to implement testing efficiently.

5 Important Aspects- Enterprises and Organizations should accept a culture shift: Traditionally the development and operations team had entirely different deliverables and responsibilities. But under DevOps, it is all about keeping the software deployable at any point of time working closely and continuously on new features.

Continuous Integration- It emphasizes on the continuous and rapid delivery of software applications. To facilitate faster delivery of software modules, the practitioner must facilitate continuous integration (CI). CI will enable QA professionals to perform unit tests regularly to evaluate the quality of code being added to the centralized code base on a daily basis. They can further get the bugs or defects identified through unit testing fixed immediately by coordinating with programmers.

Strategic Role of QA in DevOps: Under the mode, both developers and testers play equally important role and typically the Quality Analyst (QA) ties together Dev and Ops teams. It further enables teams to collaborate to have the software and applications up and running. Both the developer and the tester work in close coordination in its environment. But it has been observed that organizations without a strong and definite QA and testing strategy in faces troubles in meeting their goals for an accelerated speed of delivery.

Docker: This is a widely-acclaimed container technology that ensures that a piece of software runs reliably in different computing environments. Put simply; a container is a compilation of an application, its dependencies, libraries, and other configuration files needed for its smooth functioning. It ensures that your application runs without any hiccups even when transferred to a computing environment different from its home environment.

DevOps Cycle: Under a mature cycle, the process seen is a build, release and operate phases. However, for a typical IT organization, the scope of its cycle spans four functional areas such as a. Continuous integration and testing, b. Continuous delivery and deployment, c. Continuous operations, and d. Continuous assessments.

Production Environment Monitoring- A single cycle covers all software development activities - coding, testing, and operations. Hence, the practitioner needs to get the software testers throughout the development and deployment process. In addition to performing the required tests, the QA professionals also need to monitor the production environment continuously. The constant monitoring of the production environment will help the testers to identify the bugs before making the software crash.




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