We recently announced the arrival of our Live DevOps Innovation Platform built in-house here at Sandhata. I wanted to share some of the tools we have used for it so far, as well as my personal experiences on this platform, as it has been very interesting and a big learning experience for me.
In 2016 we started creating a live DevOps innovation platform internally in Sandhata. We have been working hard, with the goal of creating a platform which incorporates DevOps principles and practices across the whole delivery lifecycle. We want this platform to demonstrate various aspects of the delivery lifecycle, and expose the inner workings – so that the platform can be used to help others get a headstart on their continuous delivery journey and also plan their DevOps strategy based on our working example.
Having worked in the development side of projects for so long, donning a tester’s hat for some projects at my current workplace was a new experience, nevertheless a useful one. It was almost like starting from scratch. I always had this idea that testing was largely a manual process. Yes, I knew there was automation testing and I was aware of tools such as HPQC, QTP and so on. But, having never used them before, I was not sure how they were leveraged to test the multitude of requirements. So, here go a few of my observations when performing a tester role.
Results reporting is one of the key stages in the testing phase where the interested project participants or the stakeholders are presented with information on the test progress. Although many of the test automation tools have inbuilt reporting capability, the information may either be too low-level or technical, or it may not be fully relevant for management. As part of test process improvement, I’m working on a requirement to present the test results in an efficient way, so the management can visualise the current status of testing or the overall status for a test cycle, and make decisions accordingly.
Being in software testing for many years now, I feel that one thing that has never changed is IT managers always being in a position to justify the investment of test automation or any technical enablers to improve the testing function within their organisation. I think this is mainly due to difficulty in proving the ROI for testing.