Everyone has a stake in product quality; developers want to deliver high-quality code and reduce rework with early feedback, product owners want to reduce customer churn and avoid spending cycles on fixing bugs, while quality teams want to improve organizational confidence in product quality, reduce everyone’s deployment stress, and contribute to a better customer experience. The importance of quality means that everyone has a role to play in software testing, especially as DevOps practices mature and delivery cycles accelerate. Determining that role, however, often leads to contentious debate. Developers are spending a shrinking amount of time actually writing code, and automating tests with open source frameworks often results in maintenance debt that demands an increasing amount of developer time.
But when armed with the right effective automated testing tools, quality teams can build testing workflows that minimize the time and effort needed from developers that also enable them to catch bugs earlier in development cycles, reducing rework and deployment stress for the entire organization.
Low-code test automation supported by AI and machine learning helps quality teams build software testing strategies that help developers and product owners realize their quality goals without being overwhelmed. This starts with aligning testing contributions to everyone’s areas of expertise: developers are best suited to running unit tests, integration tests, and other early-stage quality checks in lower environments, while quality engineers can leverage their product knowledge and technical expertise to run comprehensive end-to-end tests. Together, the team contributes to an extensive automated testing strategy that unleashes high test coverage at DevOps speeds, which allows development organizations to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
A high-impact software testing strategy for DevOps
Developers are responsible for the quality of their code and therefore need to create and maintain proper unit tests and integration tests that provide an early warning when things break. For many development teams, this is where developer contributions to quality are concentrated. But developers also benefit from the holistic perspective fostered by end-to-end testing that reflects the customer experience. Open source frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright allow developers to create automated end-to-end tests very quickly, but offer limited coverage across complex customer journeys and ultimately result in maintenance debt. Low-code and AI capabilities in modern testing platforms have made automated testing much more efficient, enabling developers to better collaborate with quality professionals.
As noted above, integration testing should include API testing. But given the expanding role of APIs in software development, quality teams and developers have a role in ensuring that test coverage remains high across all APIs. Developers typically run API tests focused on internal APIs and contract testing for external APIs, but those tests don’t necessarily reflect how customers are interacting with APIs across the product. Quality teams can bridge this gap by expanding test coverage for external APIs, either as part of end-to-end tests or independent API tests. When integrated into end-to-end UI testing, API testing can help shorten test execution time and the effort needed to investigate test failures.
Building on the quality foundation laid by developers in the early stages of development, quality engineers support better customer experiences with comprehensive end-to-end testing, exploratory testing, and manual regression testing when necessary. Though developers can participate in these testing strategies, quality teams are generally closer to customers, typically have a close working relationship with customer support, and understand which scenarios need to be tested.
Engaging non-QA teams in software testing shouldn’t mean slowing down, or adding excessive tasks to already full workloads. Instead, testing collaboration should help everyone achieve their goals and gain greater visibility into product quality. When they’re actively engaged in testing, developers can quickly support QA when resolving defects, particularly when supported by rich diagnostic data that’s easily accessible in tools like Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. With collaborative testing supported by test automation built for DevOps, developers, product owners, and quality assurance teams have the ability to achieve their goals and expand software testing.