DevQAOps 

DevQAOps encompasses a wide range of practices and technologies that are used to improve the quality and reliability of software systems. It integrates IAAS + PAAS + SAAS as a process/discipline of managing and scaling the DevQAOps Cycle to maximize efficiency, delivery speed, and product quality.

Who needs Separate QAOps

• The larger Enterprise architecture involved multiple tools and technologies: Microblogging, E-commerce, Telecommunication, Infrastructure, Banking, and Healthcare. This larger enterprise has multiple teams like Frontend, Backend, multiple Service Layers (Microservices), Web Servers, Kafka, Caches, Multiple databases (RDMS & NoSQL), Monitoring tools, deployments version control, and Media Server (if applicable) It varies depends upon the domain and enterprise requirement. For a faster release cycle and systematic approaches, TestOps will help with deployment and environmental support.
• A product team wants their product to test with a variety of machines (i.e. ARM), a variety of Operating Systems with various versions, and its dependency libraries testing, more than functional environment-related testing plays a major role in such a team required Testops.
• Multiple product companies always share the Devops with every other team, so if you want your developers focused on development activities instead of sharing the responsibilities. You can enable TestOps Person/teams for their all-test product environments, which will help for faster collaboration and focused process.
• High-impact applications require multiple QA environments i.e. QA, Staging, QA-Automation, UAT, and Pre-Production.

• TestOps consists of the following components:

Planning

• TestOps is like DevOps planning, which involves.
• Identify the Goals, and requirements for the testing process.
• Determine the scope of the testing and types of testing required.
• Identifying the potential risk constraints.
• Timeline, Estimation, and milestone for the testing process.
• Testing schedule, resource allocation, and testing deliverables should be part of the test plan.
• Shift-Left, Shift-Right, and In-Sprint Automation Approaches are defined in the planning phase.

Additionally, the planning phase for TestOps should include identifying the tools and technologies that will be used to support the testing process and ensuring that the necessary infrastructure is in place to support the testing.

Shift Left Approach

The goal of shift left testing is to identify the bugs and resolve them as early as possible, testing will be started along with the design phase or during development. This approach reduces the costly bug.

Shift Right Approach

The testing is in the immediate pre-release and post-release phases (production). Customer Experience, correct behavior, performance, and availability are the key goals of shift-right testing.

In-Sprint Automation Approach

It’s the approach to automate the requirement/user stories within the same sprint it has been developed. without leaving any automation backlogs, which required good collaboration and potential automation testers.

Tools: Jira, Azure DevOps Board

Continuous Integration: CI

Continuous Integration is one of the key processes in TestOps which helps to automatically build, test, deploy, and deliver the software. CI can be applied for both development and automation code. Automating this testing process helps to detect and resolve the issues.

By Integrating the Test Automation/Performance into the CI Pipeline, teams can run automated tests each time code is committed, which helps to capture the issues in the early phase of development. The same process is applicable for the automation team to commit the code and run the verify pipelines.

• Quality Gates
• Static code analysis checks the code smell and security vulnerability.

Many tools are available in the market, SonarQube and ESlint are popular.

Tools: Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, Azure CI/CD

Continuous Testing: (CT)

Continuous testing in Testops Another important process in Testops involves continuously running automated tests throughout the development process to ensure that changes don’t create new bugs or regressions.

Automate Everything in various layers as part of DevQAOps

Infrastructure automation: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a method for managing infrastructure resources through code, rather than manual configuration. IaC tools such as Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates enable infrastructure definition in code, versioning, testing, and deployment.

Tools: Terraform

Platform automation: Platform Automation or PaaS (Platform as a Service) Automation is the process of automating the deployment, and maintenance of applications and infrastructure on a cloud-based platform. This includes tasks such as provisioning resources, configuring networks, deploying software, and monitoring the performance of applications. The goal of PaaS automation is to simplify the process of delivering and managing applications, increase efficiency, reduce manual errors, and provide a more stable and scalable platform. It always intersects with the continuous deployment segment.

• AWS Elastic Beanstalk – Automates the deployment and management of applications on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.
• Google App Engine – A cloud-based platform for building and hosting web applications.
• Microsoft Azure – A cloud computing platform that automates the deployment and management of applications.
• OpenShift – An open-source PaaS that automates the deployment, management, and scaling of applications.

example: PaaS automation with Terraform focuses on automating the deployment and management of platform-level components, such as databases, middleware, and other managed services.

Tools: Terraform, Ansible, Azure, Aws

Test automation: The goal of test automation is to increase the efficiency and accuracy of testing, reduce the time and cost of manual testing, and improve the quality of the software.

Automate Everything: If something can develop the same thing can be automated and tested.

The testing approach (API, UI, or Mobile) will depend on the nature of the application and the requirements of the testing process. For example:

API testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality and performance of the application’s APIs. UI testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality and visual appearance of the application’s user interface. Mobile testing is appropriate for verifying the functionality, compatibility, and performance of mobile applications on different devices and platforms.

Tools & Library: Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, Eggplant, UFT, Ranorex, TestNg, NUnit, Cucumber…

Continuous Deployment: CD

Continuous Deployment is an integral part of environmental management, continuous monitoring, and platform automation. It will often intersect with these areas. Continuous deployment supports faster release cycles by automating and streamlining the deployment process, enabling teams to get new code changes into production more quickly and with less friction.

There are many deployment strategies for larger teams.

1. Feature Flags

2. Blue/Green Deployments.

3. Rolling update deployments.

Environment Management:

One of the key components of TestOps is setting up the environment. Test for interoperability and compatibility mainly depends on the environment. Set up the necessary infrastructure and configuration to meet the requirements. This can be achieved through IAC (Infrastructure as Code), Containers, and Container Orchestration. Help in deploying infrastructure, networks, virtual machines, load balancers, firewalls, policies, and all other connections. All of these IACs can be achieved through the following tools/vendors:

1. Terraform: The IAC engine helps to automate a variety of IAC tasks, supporting multiple cloud providers.

2. ARM (Azure Resource Manager): Only support Azure IAC

3. AWS Cloud Training: Only support AWS IAC

4. Google Cloud Deployment Manager: Only support Google IAC.

Containers and container orchestration play a key role in setting up and deploying environments. This means that developers/testers can test their apps on different operating systems, runtimes, and other software dependencies without worrying about conflicts or inconsistencies. Consistency.

Here are some specific ways to use Docker/Kubernetes for interoperability testing:

• Create a repeatable test environment:
• Tested on multiple platforms:
• Test in different runtime environments:
• Simulation of different environments:

Overall, Docker makes it easy to create consistent and repeatable testing environments and test apps across operating systems, runtime, and other dependencies, which can help ensure an application can interact with many types of systems. Docker is mainly focused on packaging and distributing applications, and Kubernetes focuses on organizing and managing those applications after they are deployed. However, Docker and Kubernetes are often used together.

Tools: Docker, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Terraform, Powershell, shell scripting, Yaml

Continuous Monitoring: CM

The continuous monitoring process monitors various metrics such as performance, security, and functionality, as well as continuous testing and updating of the application to ensure that it meets the required standards.

Choosing the correct tools for monitoring, such as performance monitoring tools, log analysis tools, or network monitoring tools. There are many tools in the market.

Performance Monitoring tool: Cloud-based monitoring tools monitor the performance of applications, servers, and infrastructure, and install the agents in servers to collect the data of the applications and servers.

Log Monitoring & Analysis tool: It will help to collect, analyze and visualize the data generated by the servers, applications and infrastructure.

Network Monitoring tool: monitor the performance of their networks and identify any issues that may affect network performance, configure it to collect data from your network devices, such as routers and switches.

Tools: DataDog, Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Splunk, Nagios, AppDynamics, SolarWinds

To summarize, QAOps is the process every organization needs with a strong hold on the operations with DevQAOps, with a focus shift of QA being part of Operations.

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The quality of the project or product is managed by a QA professional. They are expected to try their hardest to test the system/application and find as many bugs as they can to ensure that the system functions as desired/expected in the environment it was designed for. From the beginning of the process until the release of the application, it is heavily involved. At a high level, QA is primarily concerned with making sure that the system correctly implements the requirements or specifications with the least amount of troubleshooting required.

Career Advancement brings QA to a decision point where they must choose which path they want to advance in their career.

Business analysis is a natural progression and a great career move for QA professionals involved in many overlapping activities like BA work. Business analytics is certainly a high-profile, high-payingcareer and it is one of the fastest growing professions with an all-time high growth rate of 14%. In short, a career change to business analytics for QA is much more promising and lucrative in today’s scenario.

Business-certain behavioural skills are essential for anyone wishing to transition to this analyst role. As a QA professional, if you have excellent verbal and written communication skills, are used to working with customers, and have good analytical skills, the business analyst role is perfect for you.

Good QA professionals who pay attention to detail are more likely to succeed as business analysts.

Here are some reasons why a career change from QA to BA makes so much sense.

Fair Understanding of Requirements

QA professionals read, analyse, and review requirement specifications based on their job profile to ultimately understand better testing. While doing this, the Quality Analyst improves their requirement/domain knowledge day by day. By putting extra effort into requirements analysis and business domain understanding, QA professionals can better plan their career change to the business analytics profession.

Intelligent at Documentation

QA specialists are involved in documentation like test planning, test case development, and error reporting at every stage of the project lifecycle.

Documentation competence is another essential skill for a business analyst. By learning new tools such as diagramming/modelling tools and effective communication skills, QA professionals can acquire the skills they need to become effective BAs.

Learning and Refining Requirements Documents

Write or document the best requirements over time. Critical and unconventional thinking. A good QA Professional is someone who has the ability to think critically and out of the box while solving drawn gaps in business problems and requirements.

Understand User Expectations Better

When testing an application for different roles/privileges, the QA expert can know what users expect from the application.

The question that then arises is whether these qualities are sufficient for a QA professional to smoothly transition to the role of business analyst. While these inherent qualities as a QA will aid in the transition, QA professionals need some degree of career development and planning, learning new skills, and maintaining existing need to improve the skills.

So here are some pointers to help the QA professional advance her chosen career as a business analyst.

1. Understand Business Fundamentals

The various organisational functions and how they directly or indirectly serve internal and external customers should be well-understood by BAs. It is significant. A QA professional must first comprehend how a business runs, how its revenue stream’s function, and what it does. We advise reading through the APQC-provided common process classification framework before getting started. I also advise reading introductory books on marketing, operations, finance, and business strategy.

2. BA Learn Processes, Tools, and Techniques

Like other activities, business analysis follows a process. The best free resource available is IIBA’s Business Analysis Core Standard. This is a short document, about 50 pages, but a very informative overview of the BA process. It gives you a good idea of how business analytics are actually done in your organization.

BAs use a variety of tools throughout their work.

They frequently employ the business process modelling, state modelling, and use case modelling tools.

Most organisations use Microsoft Visio, Lucid Chart, and BizAgi Business Process Modeller, which are all very well-liked tools.

3. Fully understand your field and industry

The Internet offers numerous resources on almost every subject increase. Search business term repositories (domains) available on a project or client/web. You can also get the manual for the domain you are on. If you work in retail, look for the Handbook of Retail. Reading the manual will give you a pretty good idea of ​​how a retail domain works. More insight and knowledge about your domain and organization will improve stakeholder acceptance. And stakeholder acceptance is key to business analyst success.

4. Actively participating in requirements gathering

Gathering serves as a foundational study for the requirements generation phase. Requirements research is one of the most important tasks for any BA. As one scholarly article puts it: „Collection errors are often the leading cause of system failures and crashes, making the overall loss or error correction cost very high. “

Participate actively in the requirements gathering process or contribute.

To better comprehend the project and its value to its users, it is imperative to become familiar with the various requirements gathering techniques.

Frequently acting as a liaison between clients and other stakeholders. They collect requirements, serve as a liaison between developers and testers, and resolve conflicts on both sides. Improved behavioural skills are needed for this. Communication, stakeholder dialogue, active listening, facilitation, conflict resolution, and creative thinking are essential business analysis skills.

5. Training & Certification – The Ultimate Key to Success

BA Certification & Training enhances professional skills and business knowledge. A Business Analytics certification expands your horizons on BA techniques and approaches. Accreditation can improve overall performance, eliminate uncertainty and expand market opportunities.

IIBA’s ECBA certification is the right place to enter the field of business analytics. ECBA not only provides a solid foundation for starting the BA profession, but also helps with global accreditation. ECBA accreditation does not require aptitude standards related to training and covers aspects related to requirements extraction, requirements analysis and management, stakeholder management, technologies used by BAs, etc.

Experience Abundant BA trainers. This increases your chances of passing quickly on your first attempt.

6. Participating in the Implementation Process

During implementation, there are many important tasks that the business analyst must perform. These tasks contribute to the success of the project and ensure that business goals are met. Most prioritizations and workarounds are resolved during this phase.

Future BAs should participate in the implementation process and learn all the processes, techniques and nuances involved.

7. Seek Internal BA Role Changes upon completion

BA training and certification, you will be able to leverage your newly gained knowledge and experience in your industry/domain by seeking opportunities within your current organization. The first thing to do is look for opportunities for internal transfers. Discuss your career goals with your manager and look for opportunities to practice your bachelor’s degree skills/techniques.

It is often said that in order to be successful, you need to be proactive and not wait for life to come your way.

Accompanying business analysts on specific projects within the organization helps them understand and apply the concepts they learn. Put yourself in the shoes of a business analyst and evaluate and learn from what you observe.

Conclusion

Moving from Quality Assurance to Business Analytics seems possible. In fact, QA professionals are the perfect people to transition into the field of business analytics.

As you move forward toward your goals, there are„ what if “moments and stumbling blocks that will test your resolve. All it takes is dedication and a willingness to learn and succeed no matter what. Remember that a good business analyst is one of the greatest assets an organization can have. Having a good and capable bachelor’s degree in an organization is like finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. 

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The numbers confirm this too: as per a survey of 500+ IT leaders and executives, the number-one driver of cloud migration is security and data protection. Fifty-eight percent of the respondents ranked security as one of their main priorities.

Then we have data modernization, which involves transferring the data from legacy to modern databases. According to the survey, 55 percent of respondents concurred that data modernization is a key factor in their companies shifting to the cloud. Cost savings and performance of IT operations rank third in the survey results. Cost is less of a factor compared to other key benefits of the cloud, which is a key enabler for organizations’ digital transformation efforts.

QA or Quality assurance and testing services are an indispensable part of any company’s cloud migration journey. For they help organizations avoid issues around cloud scalability, server breakdown, databases, website crashes and more which could potentially tarnish a brand’s reputation while costing time and resources.

In terms of application testing for cloud migration, the focus areas mainly include the following:

• Functional validation
• Integration testing
• Scalability and performance testing
• Security testing

Functional validation

This type of testing mainly validates the production readiness for applications moved to the cloud. The validation process typically involves the verification of key facets of migrated applications and whether they are performing according to the service level agreements (SLAs).

For robust cloud migration, organizations must verify SaaS (short for software as a service) and cloud services function and validate the end-to-end application’s function.

When it comes to cloud testing an application, the following test cases must be executed to check:

• Whether a valid input generates the expected results
• Whether object references and page layout work as expected
• Cross-platform compatibility
• Service integration with applications
• If the automated test suite is compatible with cloud applications

Integration testing

It must be noted that cloud migration is not only about moving the in-house workload to the cloud, but it also includes managing different variables such as authorization, authentication, integration, security, compatibility, testing and security.

Of the variables, integration with third-party tools is significant. Organizations must ensure their applications are well-integrated with third-party applications and communicate seamlessly without glitches.

It is also mandatory to identify dependencies among applications and the service level agreement with each app – because dependencies between systems and applications can make integration testing potentially challenging.

QA and testing teams must consider the following when performing integration testing:

• Cloud testing with third-party tools when varying service level agreements are at play
• Uncover coordination glitches in the cloud
• Application configuration within the cloud environment
• Resources for integration testing and validation
• Systems and interfaces that are part of integration testing
• Integration of multiple applications can complicate migration

Performance testing

This is a significant element of an organization’s cloud migration success while also being a critical part of application development.

When migrating an application to a cloud service, factors such as scalability and response time must be validated. Through automated performance testing process, a software or an application is tested for issues that require attention.

When it comes to performing performance testing, QA engineers and testers must consider the following:

• Identify the architecture of an incompatible application
• Identify the monitoring needs and setup tools
• Keep track to validate response time with regard to service level agreements
• Carry out load testing in parallel
• Record performance under different loads that meet service level agreements
• Check service level agreements, business transactions and end-to-end flow of applications

Security testing

Security is one of the main concerns of cloud migration, with service providers spending millions of dollars to provide optimal protection for their clients’ workloads.

Given the sophistication and sheer volume of cyberattacks, advanced cybersecurity measures must be put in place to ensure confidential organizational data is secure.

Business process security testing, user privacy security testing, application transaction security testing, data privacy and data security testing are the main types of testing a cloud application. 

Security testing helps eliminate the security risks of software systems and applications. The primary focus for organizations is user validation to go with validating data security in transit, during use and at rest.

The following factors must be considered at the time of security testing:

• How is data stored when idle?
• What are the different compliance requirements?
• Who has access to the data?
• Where, when and why users access data?
• What sensitive data is used, stored or transferred?
• Identify legacy applications running on obsolete systems
• Ensure only authorized users access the cloud network
• Ensure appropriate measures are put in place against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks
• Validate application, frontend and backend processes

Plan for disaster recovery and business continuity

Despite taking all necessary precautions before cloud migration, organizations must brace themselves for possible worst-case scenarios.

The measures may include simple data recovery, taking stock of the various attacks, disaster recovery practice and more.

Organizations must validate their disaster recovery strategies in the event of cloud outages. The following practises will help:

• Periodically test, measure and update business continuity practises
• Update business continuity plan based on test results
• Run simulations and assess team’s readiness
• Validate application instances to automatically restore in case of hardware failures

Summary

As per a recent study, 77 percent organizations believe that cloud technology gives them a competitive advantage—which partly explains why an increasing number of them are transitioning to the cloud. Cloud is powering organizations’ digital transformation efforts and enabling them to build innovative, digitally-collaborative and customer-friendly products and solutions at scale. It is also helping organizations respond to opportunities with greater agility.

Not with standing all the key benefits of cloud migration, organizations must follow the above QA testing checklist to the letter to ensure they avoid security, performance, functionality issues and potentially extra costs, time and resources during IT migration.

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