The role of a tester needs to evolve as organizations embrace DevOps.
Essentially an organization investing in DevOps will naturally find the need to perform test automation where possible, to allow for increased velocity of deployments to production.
However, the focus of a manual tester will be less on regression testing and meeting the business requirement.
Instead, the role needs to evolve into one of user experience assurance, making sure that business users are having an experience on their business system while at work, which matches the efficiency of the B2C apps they use on a day to day basis while banking, communicating and socializing on their smart phones.
There are several trains of thought that further define what an improved test process means for DevOps and agile methodologies, and the concern that moving changes more rapidly will result in a deterioration in quality.
According to an article by TechBeacon; “More than 50% of UI and UX developers say they want better feedback during the coding and debugging process, but less than 25% actually get the timely feedback they need”.
The article highlights the need for testers to be involved in the process as early as possible, suggesting that perhaps some sort of user experience testing is performed along with a peer code review before SAP transports have even been released or moved to the QA environment.
The article goes on to mention “High-performance teams are also more than twice as likely to bake non-functional criteria into user stories during the early planning phases.
And they cover more features with unit and user interface testing, spending twice as much time testing than lower performers.”
While some developers care less for testing than the actual writing of code, the emphasis is clear.
Automated testing and DevOps
Testing is a critical part of the stable yet rapid delivery of useful change across a DevOps environment.
Through the use of the Rev-Trac change control automation platform, we have seen some of our customers automate several testing steps, allowing for the manual testers to focus on user experience and the delivery of quality change into production.
The overall result is more frequent testing due to automation, while the manual testers are enjoying the testing and looking to add value by removing tedious and redundant manual testing requirements.
Revelation Software Concepts has integrations with several test and quality automating toolsets, which have proven to provide an ROI to SAP IT teams looking to implement a SAP DevOps methodology and improve the quality, velocity and volume of change delivered to production.
For more information about speeding up and automating your SAP deployments, please feel free to contact one of our SAP change management experts.
