Dwayne Thomas, CrowdCompass
The TV software company (the company) of this experience report creates interactive software that overlay TV program feeds. The company’s DevOps professionals mainly perform software deployment activities and IT operations. (The combination of these two activities form the acronym DevOps.) DevOps help to more frequently scale software solutions to the business market. DevOps professionals also perform production testing and scale interactive software experiences to TV viewers. Testers at the company recently started supporting the company DevOps team more actively, since the DevOps team now consumes the most of the products of testing and development activities. The company quality engineering (testing) team is faced with a question: how do testers improve software quality for DevOps customers?
Recently, many learning opportunities for DevOps professionals have arisen. Due to the 24/7 nature of the TV industry, the company DevOps professionals are on call to monitor the software deployments. The question of how to improve software quality engineering for DevOps customers is fertile for exploration because the DevOps role has only formally existed for 5 years (Wikipedia, 2013). As Gene Kim (2014) says, “DevOps is more like a philosophical movement, and not yet a precise collection of practices, descriptive or prescriptive.” Because it has existed informally for 10 years other experienced professionals in the software world assert that there are rich practices to be mined to support the DevOps role (Kowolowski, May 7 2014).
This paper provides relevant test processes and tools for quality engineering for DevOps customers. This paper analyzes author’s own most fruitful quality engineering strategies and those of his colleagues. The company pivoted from marketing software solutions offering the software tools to DevOps personnel. Case studies of testing practices of a few celebrated software development companies serve as reference for this paper. Oregon’s vibrant community meetups provide supplementary information. This paper is framed to help agile software testers to support software testing in a DevOps focused software development environments.
Target audience: Intermediate
Dwayne Thomas, 2014 Technical Paper, Paper
