Maria Homann
DevOps is, as the name implies, the bridging of development and operations. DevOps is many things. It’s a job title, it’s an approach, it’s a methodology, and it’s a way of thinking.
Regardless of which of these you are trying to gain a better understanding of, you’ve come to the right place. In this blog post, we’ll define DevOps and explain the meaning of the term in different contexts.
DevOps has emerged in connection with the agile movement as a result of the need to increase the frequency and speed of product releases while maintaining or improving a certain standard of quality.
DevOps encourages collaboration and communication between teams from development to deployment, and requires automation throughout the pipeline in order to enable the flexibility and continuity that is required to deliver quality at speed today.
When used as a job title, DevOps describes the role of a person who brings together knowledge from both the development and testing side and the operations side, so that developers have better insight into the world of the operations and vice versa.
DevOps: the integration of Development and Testing with Operations
It’s the DevOps’ responsibility to make sure that software keeps the high quality from development to release, and that it moves with speed and agility through the pipeline.
The role of DevOps personnel is to build the release pipeline with tools that allow software development teams to achieve this high quality delivery at speed. This is made possible by automation tools.
Automation removes unnecessary manual work that is repetitive and error-prone, and allows for much quicker feedback loops. As a result, processes are sped up, resources are freed, and risk is lowered. Without automation, it’s simply not possible to deliver at the pace required in today’s software space.
Automation is, in other words, a prerequisite for successful DevOps practices.
While some would argue that you aren’t doing ‘real’ DevOps until you have a completely automated pipeline with no human intervention, others understand that integrating automation into the pipeline is a gradual process, and that although many processes can with great benefit be automated, human intervention is in many cases also necessary.
Nonetheless, automation is key in DevOps. For businesses starting out with DevOps, the question is where to start.
Testing is a great candidate for automation and a good place to begin. Particularly automated regression testing can save your team many hours and resources, speed up release cycles significantly, and drastically reduce errors. This allows teams to achieve the quality delivery at speed that is strived for in DevOps.
You can learn much more about the role of DevOps, the importance of test automation, and how to start building your DevOps pipeline in our whitepaper: DevOps and Test Automation.
