Leveraging Standardization and Automation to Facilitate DevOps Testing in Multi-Code Environments

By Milan Shetti, CEO Rocket Software

In today’s volatile markets, agile and adaptable business operations have become a necessity to keep up with constantly evolving customer and industry demands. To remain resilient to change and deliver innovative experiences and offerings fast, organizations have introduced DevOps testing into their infrastructures. DevOps environments give development teams the flexibility and structure needed to drive productivity and implement early and often “shift left” testing to ensure application optimization.

While DevOps testing ecosystems require cloud technology, DevOps modernization software has allowed businesses that utilize mainframe infrastructure to successfully implement DevOps testing processes into their multi-code environments. However, introducing DevOps to mainframe infrastructure can be nearly impossible for companies that do not adequately standardize and automate testing processes before implementation.

The problem with unstructured manual testing processes

The benefits of DevOps testing revolve around increased speed and flexibility. In order to reach the full potential of these benefits and ensure a successful DevOps adoption, organizations should work to unify testing operations and eliminate any threats to productivity long before implementation begins. 

While it is important to equip developers with tools they are comfortable with, businesses working within multi-code environments must shift away from processes that require multiple vendors or lack integration. Operations that force development teams to jump from software to software to perform tasks create a complicated testing environment that can slow processes and create a disconnect between teams and departments. 

Manual testing also creates barriers to optimizing DevOps. While manual processes will still play an essential role in Quality Assurance (QA) testing, the potential for human error and the tedious, time-consuming tasks that come with manual testing make it impossible to create the speed and accuracy required for DevOps testing. And, if your testing is done using a specific developer script, you’re likely not capturing key metrics to improve your software development lifecycle, such as how the code changes the database. DevOps and true “shift left” testing environments demand structure and flexibility throughout operations that can only be achieved through standardization and automation.

Elevating testing with standardized and automated processes

To ensure successful DevOps implementation, businesses must start with an entire audit of their current operations and value stream — which is all the activities required to turn a customer request or need into a product or service. In doing so, teams can determine which software or processes create disconnects or slow operations and where automation can be integrated to enhance speed and accuracy.

Opting for vendors that offer user-friendly, code-agnostic and highly comprehensive DevOps platforms enable teams to create a central point of visibility, reporting and collaboration for processes. This standardized approach eliminates silos between teams, minimizes onboarding and allows teams a common means to rapidly commit, document and test changes to code and applications. Integrating systems and operations into a unified DevOps environment allows development and QA teams to track and schedule testing times between departments effortlessly.

From there, development teams should look to automate as many testing processes as possible. Leveraging automation in testing allows teams to implement automatic, continuous testing that eliminates human error and ensures all bugs are squashed before production. Teams can create multiple test environments and processes like unit testing, integration testing and regression testing. Standardization allows multi-code testing to be done with greater predictability and by different people — reducing the reliance on a few gifted developers and creating a more stable production phase.

Development teams can also create knowledge bases of automated testing templates to quickly pull and use or adjust to fit new and evolving testing needs. And, by leveraging automated DevOps tools, teams can configure software with controls that automatically test and vet any new coding introduced into the environment to quickly identify and address any bugs in the code or changes to the application.

The future of the mainframe and DevOps testing

A recent Rocket survey of over 500 U.S. IT professional businesses showed that the mainframe is here to stay, with more than half of the companies (56%) stating the mainframe still makes up the majority of its IT infrastructure due to its security and reliability. Thanks to highly integrative and intuitive DevOps modernization software, multi-code environments can reap the benefits of increased productivity and enhanced innovation through continuous “shift left” testing methods.

Just as the mainframe continues to modernize, so too does DevOps modernization software. Future DevOps testing software looks to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) technology to further strengthen and streamline testing environments. Organizations like Rocket Software are working to develop technologies that use AI to study testing processes to help teams identify where testing is required and what needs to be tested more accurately. ML software will be used to track relationships in testing environments to identify patterns that help teams predict future testing needs and take a more proactive approach.

As agility and speed become more important in today’s digital market, the ability of teams working within multi-code environments to implement DevOps testing into operations will become a greater necessity. Businesses that standardize processes and utilize automation throughout testing will set their teams up for success. By creating structured and flexible DevOps testing environments, teams will enhance innovation and increase speed to market to help their business pull ahead and stay ahead of the competition.

To learn more about Rocket Software’s DevOps tools and solutions, visit the Rocket DevOps product page.