What is QAOps?

Quality Assurance plays a vital role in maintaining the quality of the software project. Generally, DevOps finds it difficult to deliver software projects on time without neglecting the quality of the software. That’s exactly where QAOps comes into the picture when we deal with the timely delivery of high-quality projects.

QAOps is nothing, but the amalgamation of Quality Assurance with the IT Operation and Development teams in order to deliver high-quality software at a faster pace. QAOps also eliminates the communication gap between the QA teams and the development teams in the Software Development Process.

Quality Assurance and Software Operations in short it is called as QAOps. It refers to integrating Quality Assurance into the CICD pipeline with a DevOps mindset.

Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) includes QA at the end while QAOps suggests integrating the testing and QA from the beginning to the ending phase simultaneously with the other SDLC phases. This leaves more power in the hands of the QA team to analyze and identify bugs producing error-free future development cycles.

Life Cycle of QAOps:

QAOps highly uses the idea of continuous testing, such as CI/CD pipelines, and have the following 3 phases:  

1. Trigger: The trigger phase refers to creating correct test cases which is suitable for testing the technicality of the product without wasting time in building unnecessary test cases. The tests cases are designed in such a way that includes all the aspects of the software testing.
2. Execute:  The parallel tests which are approved in the trigger phase are executed in this phase. It is performed consecutively with the Trigger phase by executing the tests designed in the previous phase to ensure the quality of the product.
3. Report: The report phase is the final phase in the QAOps process which includes reporting the outcomes of the trigger and execute phase. The entire brief of the process is generated with a detailed description as a final report.

Methodologies used in QAOps Framework:

QAOps leverages the following set of testing methods to enable faster development cycles along with the stability and quality of the software.

• Smoke Testing: Smoke Testing is used to check the stability of the product. If the code is error-free then only it allows installing which saves time. The code must be errorless and each feature of the software must run appropriately to pass the smoke test. QAOps leverages smoke testing for verification testing.
• Automated Testing: Automated Testing enables QA Engineers to write automated testing code to test the software at a faster pace. This is leveraged by the QAOps framework in order to analyze the quality of the product that also fastens the testing process. The QA engineers first analyze the product and gather the required information for writing the automated test codes. Once this process is done, they execute the codes as a part of the QAOps pipeline.
• Regression Testing: Regression Testing allows checking the reliability of the product when it is updated with a new feature or an existing feature is enhanced. QAOps checks if the quality of the software is maintained with the introduction of the new features or modifying the code.
• Parallel Testing: Parallel Testing allows running multiple test codes for a product simultaneously which reduces the overall testing time. QAOps uses parallel testing which instantly enables faster testing. It is perfectly suitable for CI/CD pipeline. Parallel Testing requires more computation power and hardware capabilities to execute multiple codes simultaneously as it contains abundant data processing.
• Scalability Testing: Scalability Testing refers to scaling up and down the tests in order to check the product in a similar environment. It depicts how the software will behave when the usage will increase or decrease in the longer run. The tests should be able to synchronize with the data and the process during scale up or down. QAOps must ensure a scalable infrastructure leveraging scalability testing in the pipeline.

Benefits of QAOps:

• When QAOps is integrated into the SDLC, it provides higher quality software products compared to the traditional method.
• Along with the quality delivered, QAOps also considers the timelines, and the product is delivered within the predefined deadline.
• QAOps allows the development and QA teams to work in coordination that eliminates the ambiguity between different teams providing better results.
• The CI/CD pipeline suggests continuous testing allowing the errors and bugs to be identified at an earlier stage which provides a reliable product.
• The final phase in the QAOps process builds the reports of the overall process which makes us understand the development and the testing with the results.

Finally, QAOps can also be considered as continuous testing as it simultaneously executes testing along with the development that leads to faster delivery of the software when implemented correctly. Along with the faster delivery, QAOps also ensures the quality of the product. The framework brings IT Operations, Development, and Quality Assurance Teams together to streamline the entire process.