Testing Underlines Gartner’s Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting DevOps
Testing early is a foundational part of embracing DevOps and modernizing your team. This idea has been emphasized recently in Gartner’s new infographic: the Top 10 Technology Trends Impacting DevOps.
We know that testing is imperative when it comes to delivering quality products; however as trends push everything to be more agile, more continuous, and more distributed, testing can feel like a burden when deadlines loom over your teams. And although testing can be burdensome, it is essential to get quality products to market in time to grab your business’s competitive edge.
Along with following the trends that will help your transition to DevOps, let’s dive into how test driven product development practices can facilitate this transformation.
Test-Driven Product Development
In their infographic, Gartner reflects on how to continuously deliver software while maintaining high-quality code. Augmenting your agile and DevOps practices with AI will help ensure both quality and speed of delivery. One area worth focusing your AI-adoption efforts on to improve your DevOps practices is testing.
Testing keeps the DevOps process running smoothly. By testing during development, not only will you prevent potential failures, but create accountability for your developers to own their own code, preventing a divide within your team.
However, just because there are new trends and practices to adopt for better processes, it doesn’t always mean it’s easy (or possible) to follow them. What if the majority of your application was built prior to implementing test-driven development? It would be too costly and slow to rewrite your entire application using TDD principles. This is why it’s important to maintain high coverage as your code base grows and results in a decrease of holistic knowledge among your developers.
With the growth of AI-enabled tools and technologies, testing doesn’t need to be a burden; the days of manual testing are almost behind us (even for our dated code). Diffblue Cover has introduced developers to AI augmentation early in their pipeline by automating the creation of unit tests for Java. There are plenty of areas of development that will always require the hand-crafted skills of a developer, but the mundane tasks of testing can be augmented.
By creating accountability over your code and augmenting it with AI tooling, you will decrease the risk of finding out late in the development process that much of your code is not testable, and avoid introducing risks and delays that may dominate throughout your entire business operations. Not releasing quality, on-time product risks impacting not only your dev teams, but also potentially sales, marketing, customer service, and every other business unit.
Tough platforms to build on
Gartner recognizes the rise of platform teams that are building the foundations and underlying infrastructure that make it possible to deliver your key business functionality. Testing early in development can help alleviate the burden of knowing if a failure is in your application or the infrastructure on which your tooling is run.
As we enter a post-migration world, infrastructure will be increasingly built natively within the cloud and run autonomously. As Gartner notes, there are many considerations for DevOps teams, from container management and observability to serverless PaaS and immutable infrastructure.
With the movement of development work becoming decentralized as teams and infrastructure are increasingly scattered around the globe, the need for every line of code to be carefully tested is more important than ever. Your developers may not have visibility or the holistic understanding necessary to determine dependencies or how the most minor code change could ignite failures that ripple throughout your entire code base.
Testing your code throughout the development process limits these failures as any failed test may highlight a dependency that can be rectified before the change becomes a failure that needs to be resolved.
Staying reliable, secure and compliant
Beyond creating great products, other realities and regulations impact the way our teams need to work and how our code needs to run. Gartner buckets these into three categories: reliability, security, and compliance. It would be extremely difficult to meet standards in each category without proper testing practices.
The earlier we can build resilience into our code by ensuring what we deploy is safe, the fewer issues will be uncovered or exploited by malicious actors after our products are released.
Much of what we see in trends around DevOps today relates to the nimbleness of our software delivery, ensuring its quality, and protecting our customers. Strong, repeatable unit testing practices at the beginning of our development process will enhance the adoption of every new DevOps trend to come.
If you’re tired of writing unit tests manually, Diffblue can completely automate this tedious practice for you. Check out our free Community Edition of Diffblue Cover.
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Originally published at https://www.diffblue.com on January 28, 2021.
