Quality is most likely foremost in your mind when building a new product, but have you ever looked deeper into software quality management specifically?
It essentially ensures the accuracy, requirements, and amount of quality achieved by a product via providing improvements to the product development process.
One way to achieve this is using a tool like Allure TestOps.
INDEX
Let's focus on TestOps
What is Software Quality Management, and what are its components?
Components of Software Quality management
How to TestOps fit into Software Quality Management
Why emphasize the “Test” in TestOps?
Other benefits of TestOps
What is Allure TestOps?
How can Allure TestOps help with Quality Management?
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Allure TestOps is a product that has built software quality into its development by making it a platform that brings together automated and manual testing.
I've gleaned insights for this article based on an interview with Ruslan Akhmetzianov, a DevRel lead at Qameta, and Andrey Ryoo, a DevOps expert at Qameta.
They shared how they can help you improve your product quality control and boost your QA and development teams’ productivity by setting your TestOps. This, in turn, helps create a culture where quality is everyone's responsibility.
Let's focus on TestOps.
I've mentioned this in previous articles, but TestOps is the automation process of centralizing and streamlining your software development's planning, monitoring, and testing.
The idea is to turn disjointed, siloed teams and processes into a well-oiled engine that allows you to produce better software faster and with fewer bugs.
Want to know how to level up your product quality control and boost your QA and development?
One piece that many folks don't focus enough on is the software quality management piece of TestOps.
What is Software Quality Management, and what are its components?
You may think, “Do I need software quality management in an Agile SDLC? Does it add any value?”
ISO 8402-1986 defines software quality as “the totality of characteristics and features of a product or service that bears its ability to imply needs or satisfaction stated.”
Simply speaking, software quality can be said to be the degree to which you produce the correct software.
It’s been said that it’s difficult to describe what quality is, but it can definitely be recognized if present.
Thus, an efficient software quality management process is imperative to ensure visible quality in the final product and the techniques required to create it.
Software Quality Management (SQM) is the comprehensive process that ensures a software product complies with its requirement specs and relevant national and international standards like ANSI, IEEE, and ISO.
Furthermore, it provides value in terms of:
- Increased productivity of the development team
- Improved product quality
- Decreased re-work costs due to early detection of defects in every SDLC stage
- Increased confidence levels of the development team as well as clients
- Increased credibility
- Saves costs
- Maintains great user experience
- Bring in more profitability
- Boosts customer satisfaction.
Components of Software Quality management
Software quality management should be independent of project management to ensure the independence of cost and schedule adherence. It directly affects the process quality and indirectly affects the product quality.
Some of the components include:
- Quality Assurance – QA aims to develop organizational procedures and standards for quality at the corporate level.
- Quality Planning – Select applicable procedures and standards for a particular project and modify them as required to develop a quality plan.
- Quality Control – Ensure that the software development team follows best practices and standards to produce quality products.
How to TestOps fit into Software Quality Management
TestOps fits nicely into software quality management, as it ensures that developers are testing their work from their perspective, and that said, testers are thinking out of the box.
TestOps is about helping you test, including deploying your tests to an environment rather than waiting for another process to kick in before you can test.
It's a faster, less complex, money-saving process.
We have all worked on teams where we depend on Ops to clean/refresh our environments and must wait for it to finish deploying something.
Not only is this frustrating, but it also takes extra time and adds cost.
Ruslan mentioned in my interview with him that TestOps should help people break the expertise siloed between QA, developers, and ops.
TestOps is not only a faster way to deliver software, but it does so without losing quality.
Why emphasize the “Test” in TestOps?
Ruslan said that developers and testers have different mindsets if you think about it.
Many companies claim their developers do all the testing, so they do not need QA folks.
Developers, indeed, perform a lot of testing.
They create unit tests; they run the software through many quality gates before deploying it to the user.
But developers tend only to test the “happy” path.
The goal of developer testing is to ensure their code works as intended.
However, someone with a tester's mindset, aka “QA person,” approaches testing more like, “Let's check that it doesn't do something wrong while it does what it is intended to do.”
If you leave out QA, the quality of your software will drop. And it's not because developers can't write tests; it's just that they have a different mindset.
Other benefits of TestOps
- TestOps ensures that the product development pipeline has all the testing frameworks and tools. It is common for QA engineers to rely on the pipelines that IT puts together without much input. TestOps changes this by owning test activities related to DevOps, allowing QA engineers and developers to have full ownership and visibility of the development pipeline so they can tailor it to meet their needs.
- It has enhanced test planning. Automation is not effective if the entire codebase has to get tested every time a line of code is changed. TestOps provides a centralized platform that makes it easier for testers and developers to identify what tests to run and when.
- TestOps allows developers to leverage the benefits of test automation. It reduced execution time. It eliminates the complexity of manual testing and enables developers to use their tests effectively.
Are there any tools that can help with TestOps?
What is Allure TestOps?
Allure is a fully-supported tool that provides a next-gen Software Quality Management Platform that combines automated and manual testing.
It was created to improve product quality control and boost QA and development team productivity by setting your TestOps.
For example, Allure TestOps can update your test documentation based on test run results tracking and analysis.
So, there are no more excuses for outdated test cases.
Other features include:
- Allure TestOps links both manual and automated testing empowering your team's productivity.
- Reinforce and speed up your CI/CD pipeline and get instant insights into your test coverage
- Review your product's status, create targets, and follow the process using Allure TestOps Analytics
- Create your own set of KPIs using an Allure Query Language and keep track of your project's progress at a glance
Is this the same as Allure Reports?
If you are a test automation Selenium engineer, you've probably used the popular open-source Allure report.
Qameta's Allure TestOps was born out of Allure report.
Based on user feedback, the Qameta team learned that people wanted their reports to be sustainable, persistent, and easy to share.
That caused the team to start thinking about how to make the reporting process even more manageable.
One way they achieved this was by focusing on creating an API that allowed them to integrate with a large number of continuous integration tools.
Since different teams use different CI/CD tools, the reporting had to work with many systems.
Allure TestOps Integrations
So, the Allure team started creating all these integrations with popular tools they knew their users were using already, like TeamCity, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitHub, and GitLab.
This is critical because developers and testers want to be able to take their tools and plug them into their pipeline without custom development.
That's why if you look at Allure TestOps, you can see that they have integrations with 26 frameworks and 11 programming languages.
The Allure TestOps team officially maintains them, so they can officially say they work well and are backed by the team.
If for some reason, you need to do something that is not currently supported because they built their tool to be extendable, it's not hard for them to make such an integration.
How can Allure TestOps help with Quality Management?
Allure TestOps has been on the market for some time now and has a great community of users.
Allure TestOps also helps you implement your Software Quality Management process because it enforces certain elements, including:
- Reputation: Having software quality management strategized for the products you are building leads to having good quality products rather than having to keep fixing features and adding costs as you go. This not only helps your customers but also leads to having an optimistic company and boosted employee morale.
- Predictability: It's best to ensure you deliver a product of utmost quality; otherwise, fixing things can increase costs. Therefore, having software quality management baked into your tools gives a great sense of predictable positive outcomes.
- Customer Satisfaction: A tool that provides users with what they need is already a plus point, but ensuring customer satisfaction is an added point. The goal of any software is to delight the user.
If you are keen to learn more about Allure, please go to their website and learn more via their blogs and provide them with your feedback.
Allure TestOps is a tool that has all the features you are looking for.
Why not try it out and let me know what you think?
