beyond DevOps tools & their functions
There are important tools used that effectively enable DevOps, but tools are just that – “Tools”.
Git, Trello, Project, and Jira cannot enable planning without your plan. Coding in GitLab, GitHub, Stash etc achieve nothing without skills for the planned work. Tools like Docker, Puppet, Chef, Ansible and Gradle cannot automatically create and track your various builds without their intended structure and vision for your builds. Automated testing tools like Jenkins, Selenium, JUnit, JMeter, mabl, Bamboo, Kobiton, Vagrant, BlazeMeter, Codeception, TestNG and Vagrant have no purpose if there are no expected results to measure against after building. Automated deployment tools like Jenkins, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift, OpenStack and Jira will be unused without production environments or containers in which solutions will be deployed or distributed. It is crucial that your teams can do the work manually, understand the processes to be automated, and are able to use and supervise the automation tools for DevOps.
Your DEV + OPS teams’ collaboration will only be successful when they have meaningful and effective conversations – ie. if they can deploy themselves “by proxy” using the tools you provide, and the tools also continue collaborating.
DevOps testing tool considerations
The testing tools for DevOps include the likes of Jenkins, Selenium, JUnit, JMeter, mabl, Bamboo, Kobiton, Vagrant, BlazeMeter, Codeception and TestNG.
Review and compare tools and work to your team’s strengths – use their experience and insight and get them talking – give recognition for great ideas…
You should be considering these elements and qualities while selecting your DevOps testing tool(s):
· ci/cd capability. (Continuous integration and continuous delivery)
· cloud support, preferably multi cloud – google, aws, azure, etc. (with kubernetes, containers etc.)
· bug detection and bug fixing capabilities with self-repair options. (AI driven solutions exist – test them)
· cross-platform support or platform-agnostic design (your solution may need to deploy diverse systems)
· capability for integration with other tools (diversity promotes healthy competition)
· real-time easy-to-use collaboration capability (seamless integration to collaboration tools for teams)
· robust industry-standard api support and knowledge base (community collaboration inspires innovation)
· effective, efficient, responsive and continuously improving customer support. (Knowledgebases that grow)
· ability to be customised (out-of-the box vanilla solutions need to adapt to your requirements)
· automation of varied processes in software development (continuous and seamless hand-over)
· monitoring of testing with analytics features (reporting with analysis of results creates actionable insights)
· easy to use central dashboard with management tools (good automation requires 20/20 oversight)
· industry-leading performance and kpi’s (real and intuitive industry metrics)
· affordability and a realistically calculated projection for return on investment (ROI)
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DevOps deployment tools
The deployment tools for DevOps enable the link to development by availing it to operations. These will be discussed in next week’s article and features of Jenkins, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift, OpenStack and Jira will be discussed. Highlighting some pitfalls and successes in this highly contested DevOps segment.
In WiRD’s experience it is important to be clear on which tools will be used for each DevOps category. What has your experience been with regards to deploying DevOps testing tools and DevOps automation? Please share your experiences with WiRD by commenting or interacting on LinkedIn.
Here is a link to a free introduction lesson on DevOps
Courses like this link below are available and could give a better insight into the DevOps testing field
(There is a preview introduction video of the course on the page)
https://www.linkedin.com/learning/software-testing-foundations-continuous-testing-and-devops