I recently read a great analogy describing Waterfall vs DevOps. While Waterfall requires the team to be driving 4X4 vehicles to deliver their change across a landscape, DevOps requires an automation evangelist to pave smooth roadways so that the delivery team can drive supercars at fast pace across the landscape.
One of the keys is around user experience, which has in the past been overlooked by many organizations in the enterprise space. However, with new HTML interfaces, B2C software and apps setting such a high standard, enterprise businesses are looking for ways to “consumerize” their internal business experience, making the user experience and ease of use for business systems important to improve efficiency of the business.
The chaining of automation toolsets across a system landscape is essential to achieve continuous integration and continuous delivery (CICD), however test automation is a touchy point. While it is often handy to have automated test scripts to ensure that the process is lean and allows for rapid deployments, there is a certain aspect that automation cannot handle, and that is the user experience.
An important role is emerging in the DevOps space, a tester cannot simply make sure the functionality works as per the specification. Rather, a tester must verify the user experience of the application is working under real-life conditions and on business devices and networks. Where possible, the tester should be looking for opportunities to improve the UX before the changes are deployed.
While test automation is essential, the type of manual testing required to successfully deploy at rapid speed is becoming just as important.
In this quarter’s eNews article to be released later this month, I also discuss some of the options around Test Automation in a DevOps environment.
For more information about processes that can be utilized to speed up your SAP deployments, please feel free to contact the team at consulting@rev-trac.com
