Thursday, February 18, 2016

DevOps needs MetaAutomation for Quality


DevOps emphasizes collaboration and communication between all members of a software team, including leads, designers, devs, QA and test people. (See the Wikipedia article on DevOps.)

It needs speed and reliability.

A weak quality practice won’t work – regressing and testing can take huge amounts of time, and measuring software quality is more difficult if it’s hampered by outmoded ideas, e.g. “The point of Test is to find bugs,” or “Test automation does what manual testers do, but faster and more reliably … we hope.”

MetaAutomation shows the way to the powerful quality automation that DevOps needs:

1.       The team knows exactly what is measured by the automated checks, and what is not

2.       With self-documenting hierarchical check steps that report “pass,” “fail,” or “blocked” for each step, the correctness of product behavior is clear from the business-facing view and the granular technology-facing view

3.       Since the artifacts (results) of the check runs are pure data, presentation is completely flexible, and analysis is robust

4.       The manual testing role never has to repeat tedious steps, so they can do what they’re good at, which is more fun and satisfying anyway

5.       The QA team delivers quality measurements with speed, accuracy and precision, earning the respect and esteem of their fellow team members

6.       Checks can be run across tiers and devices, with unified artifact results, to make quality measurement simpler, more robust, and less risky

7.       Check runs scale with resources, so results are available almost arbitrarily fast, giving transparency and trust to the rest of the team

Check out http://MetaAutomation.net for more information, and some complete open-source sample implementations with reusable components.