Brands across the globe rely on various enterprise software for achieving their diverse business goals. The IT spending on various software like CRM, ERP, HRMS, SCM is growing steadily and rapidly and over the years billions of dollars are estimated to be spent in the coming year. The growing popularity of enterprise software has forced the developing and QA teams to re-evaluate their age-old software development methodologies and fill in the loopholes with technological solutions that are faster, qualitative and cost-efficient. When we speak about new software developing techniques then all fingers point towards none other but DevOps. DevOps has brought a paradigm shift in the speed of software development which is mandatory to survive the dynamic and fast pace market. Continuous testing is the major part of DevOps which brings efficiency in the software development cycle. Be it Salesforce testing, sap testing or any other enterprise software, its development is incomplete without continuous testing. In this blog, we will have an overview on DevOps and also explore its contribution in testing enterprise software.
An Overview on DevOps
DevOps is short for Development and Operations. DevOps can be best put as a methodology and a thought process where you combine the development and the operations part of building a product into one iterative loop so that each step of development feeds the next step. So the iterative loop starts with planning the work, deciding what features to add, then developing code for the feature, once the coding is done you can build it and test it. Once the testing is done and everything passes, you can release it which would lead to the deployment stage where you deploy the code to the production server. Post-deployment is the operation stage which is the day-to-day running of the system and the final step of the loop is the monitoring part. This is how basically DevOps functions.
As we are now familiar with the basic functioning of DevOps, now let’s have a look at the 6 essential elements that tie the whole process together and results in a quality solution.
Continuous Planning
During Continuous planning, all the team- developers, project managers, business analysts, operations staff and all other stakeholders meet on a common platform to understand the scope of the application and analyze the outcomes and resources.
Continuous Integration
In Continuous integration small chunks of codes are committed frequently, the build is tested and the bug-free codes are deployed. Continuous integration focuses on integrating the bug-free codes and integrating them with the last developed code.
The below paragraph will emphasize on the role of DevOps in Software testing:
Continuous Testing
Continuous testing is a crucial part of DevOps for application development. Continuous testing means test early and test often. In continuous testing, testing takes place right from the earlier stages of the development cycle like planning and designing to deploying and monitoring. This saves a lot of time and costs in detecting and rectifying bugs in the later stages of the project. Continuous testing works best in a fast-paced environment like continuous integration and with the right set of automation testing tools and frameworks like Appium, selenium, etc.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery is a process that entails the delivery of the code changes to a mock production server in order to avoid any mistakes in the client site server. Also, the delivery of code changes is done in small intervals to ensure that the product can be released at any time. DevOps enable the code changes as and when required without any delay. The aim is to build, test and release to the customer faster and frequently in shorter cycles.
Continuous Deployment
In Continuous Deployment, any changes in the test code is directly deployed to the production or the client-side server.
Continuous Monitoring
DevOps makes it a point to test and monitor the application until it gets deployed in the production server. Continuous monitoring helps in identifying the slightest of the issues and resolving them. It also ensures the stable functioning of the software.
Conclusion
From the above discussion, it’s clear that continuous testing and DevOps are the right technical solution for developing high-performing applications and enterprise software testing like Salesforce Testing, SAP Testing, and Workday Testing, etc. Just the right set of test automation tools is going to make all the difference. Opkey is a SAAS-based continuous testing platform for testing enterprise software like SAP, Oracle EBS, Workday, Trackwise, Kronos, SAP and many more. It automates multiple technologies for performing seamless sap test automation, Salesforce automation, etc. from a single interface that performs continuous testing by the seamless integration of DevOps infrastructure. Powered by AI it provides accelerated software testing and also allows the test engineers to create automation scripts fast with pre-built keywords without any coding knowledge. All these key features make Opkey the best continuous testing platform for enterprise software.