Simon Howlett, Workiva
A DevOps team’s remit is that of ‘frictionless development’. This is a desire for a development ideal driven by a ‘need for speed’ and the conscious & intentional removal of hold ups in taking an idea from concept to customer. Frictionless development allows product teams to concentrate on innovation instead of being beholden to often-arbitrary processes. This movement poses an interesting question for Quality Assurance Engineers as the ‘need for speed’ mindset places challenges them to do more with less (time, mostly), and the challenge to sync the two sides of the conversation is often fractious.
Focusing on increasing the speed of delivery often brings issues of quality into focus. Careful relationship management and compatible tooling coupled with a quality driven mindset across an organization is required to attempt to ensure that ‘need for speed’ is taken as a metaphor for efficiency not just ‘fast.’
Aligning both DevOps and TestOps teams is a technique that can speed up the product release and support a robust and reliable quality focused product, two areas that often comprise each other.
Target Audience: Intermediate
2015 Technical Paper, Simon Howlett, Paper, Slides, Notes, Video.
