Cloud Center of Excellence, DevOps and Test Automation

What is DevOps?

DevOps promises transformational possibilities. But what exactly is it? DevOps couples development processes with operational best practices in a way that unifies people, processes, and technologies. DevOps empowers development teams to deliver more value, faster to their customers and business partners.

DevOps demolishes the silos of the traditional waterfall operating model for IT organizations. By combining previously siloed functions such as development, operations, quality control, and security, this operating model delivers expedited and more reliable results. When you adopt a DevOps culture, supported by the necessary systems and tools, teams can adapt to customers’ changing needs faster and increase the quality of the solutions they build.

What does it take to implement DevOps in your organization?

In our experience, it takes more than organizational and process initiatives to to realize DevOps’ full potential. You need the right tools, automation, frameworks and full visibility throughout the entire development lifecycle. Without the full spectrum of resources, you cannot manage fully automated CI/CD, a tenant of the DevOps methodology. Here are some of the critical elements:

• Governance (Azure setup & Cost Management)

• Guard rails (Azure Policies & Azure Blueprints)

• Microservice Architecture

• Application Framework

• Test-Driven Development framework

• Automation in every phase and at every level (test, deployment, provisioning, and pipelines)

• Reusable architectural components

• Infrastructure & Continuous Deployment tools

• Monitoring tools

• DevOps Methodology and Mindset

At cVation, all consultants and developers are trained to follow the same protocols. We enforce our DevOps standards with the CADD toolbox, which contains all of the components mentioned above. CADD is managed by chief architects from our Cloud Center of Excellence-team (CCOE) so our best practices can be codified and deployed across every client engagement.

Test Driven Development is key

Test Driven Development (TDD) is an agile development methodology where requirements are codified into test cases that form the basis for development. The test will initially fail because the feature has yet to be developed. The goal of TDD is to focus on developing code that is good enough to prevent test failures.

Effective TDD ensures that all parts of the software are being tested automatically, at all times. Continuous Testing supplements development by testing the software while it is being developed. At the same time, it assures that no regressions sneak into the software. That way, the developer can concentrate on the new feature and and be notified if existing features are impacted without compromising the speed of development or stability of existing features during the lifetime of the software solution.

TDD instills confidence in the quality of the software. The design can be restructured and streamlined on an ongoing basis using refactoring to prevent Software Entropy - without compromising the speed of development or quality over the software’s lifetime.

A consistent testing structure is invaluable for generating self-documented tests. The test-set from TDD is a critical part of automated quality control in DevOps CI/CD.