DevOps success starts with quality engineering
Stuck on the road to DevOps? It’s time to consider quality engineering.
Studies show that DevOps adoption is still a moving target for the vast majority of software development teams, with just 11% reporting full DevOps maturity in 2022. Navigating this transition requires organization-wide metrics that help everyone understand their role. To that end, Google developed the DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics to give development teams a straightforward way to measure DevOps maturity.
Fernando Mattos, Director of Product Marketing at low-code test automation platform mabl, put it this way: “DORA metrics can really affect the business outcomes of what a software team is developing, is doing right. And quality engineering can help optimize some of the steps taken in a development process. Code. So the way that we see it is, if you adopt quality engineering practices, and improve test automation, you get more efficient in that process, more effective test coverage. Then you can improve the DORA metrics, which improves the business. And that’s how we’ve been talking to engineering leaders and company leaders.”
DORA metrics were created in 2014 as a way after research into what makes development teams elite, and in turn, makes the organization more mature in its DevOps practice. This, of course, results in a correlation between engineering efficiency and hitting the goals of the business. By delivering new features faster, fixing defects faster and providing a better customer experience, the result is more business, higher conversion rates and lower churn from customers.
Mattos went on to explain that Mabl sees test automation as a critical piece in the delivery chain. “Lead time for change and change failure rate are two key metrics we see impacted there,” he said. “Change lead time is the time it takes from committing a piece of code to when it’s released to production. And it goes through all kinds of steps there.” He gave the example of a team that has streamlined its code review process, automated its entire pipeline, but still needs to do testing before it can be released to production. “They can have unit testing, integration testing, and they’re running all kinds of tests. But if it takes too long, then it reduces the lead time for change, which negatively impacts the business. So, all the improvements that they did in other parts of the process just go down the drain.
“So, by integrating quality engineering and test automation specifically,” he continued, “they can really optimize their outcomes.”
Mattos went on to stress that it’s critically important to ensure your test coverage is focused on the customer experience, which will lower the change failure rate. “Lots of customers we talk to have high test coverage, but it’s removed from the customer experience. So they feel like they’re testing everything, but when they release (the software) to production, some of the flows get broken, especially if there’s integration with third-party tools, which is very difficult to pass using traditional test automation tools.”
Mabl is trying to help teams build end-to-end continuous testing that’s focused on the customer, according to Mattos. “That’s the flow customers care about, the experience that they go through – functional and non-functional. Connecting to usage, metrics tools, understanding what flows are the most used by customers.. those have high coverage.” Mabl is trying to make sure that as part of that continuous testing, “you have something that’s looking from the eyes of the customer and looking at the experiences that are important for the customers.”
Content created by SD Times and Mabl
The post DevOps success starts with quality engineering appeared first on SD Times.
Tech Developers
No comments