What’s the most disruptive change in today’s IT organization? Is it cloud and mobile computing? The rise of analytics and Big Data? Is it the shift to agile and DevOps? Or is it the acceptance of the CIO as a business strategist?
While
these are all important changes in the way businesses approach technology and how the IT department is organized, these pale in comparison to the changes sweeping the under-appreciated, lonely QA profession.
Kurt Bittner, Principal Analyst at Forrester, spent some time with us to discuss how QA is changing, sharing some deep insights into the previously under-estimated and misunderstood QA and testing profession. What he shared was truly eye-opening.
The Rise of Continuous Deployment
Kurt said that one of the biggest trends over the last 3-4 years is that organizations primarily driven by adoption of agile approaches have realized that agile approaches alone aren’t enough to deliver business results. They need to deliver business value faster, which requires a number of different changes lumped under the heading of continuous delivery.
This represents a fundamental shift in the way IT departments operate. Instead of project-based operations we’re moving to a product-delivery type operation.
And consequently the role of QA has had to change - drastically. From Kurt’s talk with us we identified 10 ways QA is changing to reflect this move to continuous delivery. Here are the first five.
1. Continuous Testing
With the move to continuous development, QA is under tremendous pressure because of the new development workload. But traditionally our poor testing professionals wouldn’t get the code they needed to test until too late. They would then bear the brunt of the complaints when bad code fell through the cracks.
Now QA is becoming an integral part of day-to-day development activities as opposed to something that gets short-changed at the end. It’s not uncommon for testers now to have to execute several QA sessions in a single day.
2. No Separate QA “Timebox”
With the shift to continuous testing, there really is no more need for distinct QA timebox. QA activities happen continuously, as do software releases, and QA professionals are in continuous collaboration with developers.
3. Shift to automated, API-based testing
The shift to continuous testing and the elimination of specific QA timeboxes has meant QA volume and quality demands have increased exponentially. Traditional manual testing methodologies cannot possibly scale to meet this demand. The throughput is just not there.
The solution? A shift to automated QA around APIs. Application quality control can now happen before a graphical front-end has been added, saving the development team time and resources fixing bugs after-the-fact.
4. Rise of the Developer-Tester
With the shift to automated testing we’re seeing the rise of the developer-tester who develops automated tests against APIs and service interfaces, instead of manually executing a set of test scripts against the UI.
The developer-testers are essentially building “headless automation” that’s run as part of a continuous integration process. Once each test is deployed it runs as part of an automated test environment.
5. Shift to the Nearshore Delivery Model
Continuous deployment and testing changes how development teams are held accountable. The work is a continuous flow, making it more challenging to schedule work across time zones. Subsequently it’s now more attractive to work in the Near Shore model, working with teams in Latin America, making it easier for North American clients.
In our next post, we’ll share five more changes affecting the QA function within a continuous delivery environment.
