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 DevOps: The Rise of QA?
The DevOps movement which has been doing hard work to break down silos, improve deployment quality and even push towards continuous production deployments has focused on improved cooperation and communication between developers and the system admins (operations) who deploy releases out into production.
Recently, I've been wondering, "Where's QA and test?" The DevOps community has put a lot of emphasis on automated testing, which is great, but I haven't heard a whole lot about where manual QA fits in. Listening to Timothy Fitz from IMVU champion continuous production deployment at the recent Leaders of Agile virtual conference was a little reassuring. Even though IMVU automatically deploys most code changes that pass tests to production - deploying many times a day - there's still skilled, human testers involved. They test new functionality and features before those features are enabled and made visible to end users. So, QA and testers do have a place. A aggressive view of the role of testers was presented by Bola Rotibi's in her editorial in SD Times, "Rise of the machines: Power brokers in DevOps bonding! While Ms. Rotibi's thesis was that communication and automation are key (and we love that), she explored QA's role as a conduit and facilitator between development and operations: The line of communication between Dev and Ops needs to be clarified. Neither is well-versed in communicating what either needs to carry out their respective responsibilities. QA and testing, a group within the software delivery team, could and should help smooth the relations between the two sides. This strikes me as a critical step in the evolution of a traditional, siloed IT shop into one with stronger development to operations coordination, trust and cooperation. Even today, QA teams have many of the needs of development teams as well as operations. They have infinite work and need to move quickly and test new builds frequently. Their pace is closer to development's than operations. At the same time, if things aren't being installed properly in QA, if control is lacking, their work can be wasted. QA should be primed to lead Dev and Ops as they move forward with Agility and Control. What remains to be seen is if QA and test has the courage to embrace automation and enough respect from their partners in the IT organization to be able to lead. Re: DevOps: The Rise of QA?
Can you please refrain from using testing as a synonym for QA and visa versa? Testing assists QA in a minor way but QA is a management practice, a process improvement practice. The retrospectives in a sprint are definitely QA and the role of the Scrum Master has certainly got a whole lot of QA tasks.
Not saying those aren't sometimes outcomes of testing too but testing is a totally different beast to QA. If you lump them together you're ignoring a whole part of the SDLC and giving away opportunity.
Oliver
Re: DevOps: The Rise of QA?
Oliver,
While I tend to agree with you in principal, when I visit customers and ask them what test environments they have, they usually say something like, "Well, we have dev test, QA, UAT...." What happens in the QA environment? "Well, some automated tests run and then the QA team does X,Y,Z kinds of testing". While companies seem to have quality improvement initiates or processes, the term "QA" seems to me to be lost in the same way "hacker" is lost. Hackers are no longer good programmers, they are security threats. Likewise, QA is a place where the QA team runs tests. But yes, quality happens throughout the SDLC. You need a decent plan of what you're going to make, good programming practices, good automated testing to catch the basics, evil mastermind testers who break things anyway, and coordination throughout. I think the core of argument in the post is actually that the coordination and sharing of tools throughout is what's missing most today. Further, that the team known as "QA" and you would prefer I called "testers" are actually some of the best situated to facilitate that coordination. If they do so, perhaps they retake the word "QA" to mean more than test. But they need to step up and take a leadership role in the brave new world of DevOps. I |
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All other trademarks are owned by their respective owners.
tel: (216) 858-9000 fax: i (216) 393-0006 email:info@urbancode.com