What do you do if you're a software tester facing the rising demand for agile and DevOps methodologies?

As a software tester encountering increasing demand for agile and DevOps methodologies, it's essential to embrace change and adapt accordingly. Prioritize continuous learning to stay abreast of emerging trends and technologies in the field. Wisely automate repetitive tasks to enhance efficiency and focus on high-value testing activities. Collaborate proactively with developers, stakeholders, and other team members to align testing efforts with agile and DevOps practices. Adapt testing strategies to fit the iterative and rapid-paced nature of these methodologies, emphasizing early and continuous testing throughout the development lifecycle.

Embrace the shift! Become a QAOps champion by focusing on upskilling in Agile and Devops. Shift from Phase-Based to Continuous Testing, move away from traditional, phase-gated testing towards integrating testing throughout the development lifecycle. Explore tools for automation, shift-left testing (testing early in the development cycle), and API testing

As a software tester, adapting to the rising demand for agile and DevOps methodologies involves embracing automation, continuous integration, and collaboration with developers and operations teams. You'll need to prioritize quick feedback loops, frequent releases, and iterative testing to ensure quality throughout the development process. Learning about tools like Jenkins, Selenium, and Docker can also be beneficial. Additionally, staying updated on industry trends and best practices is essential for success in this evolving landscape.

As a software tester facing the rising demand for agile and DevOps methodologies, the key is to learn continuously. Stay updated with the latest trends, tools, and best practices in agile and DevOps through workshops, online courses, and industry publications. Embrace a mindset of adaptability and readiness to embrace new techniques and technologies. By expanding your knowledge and skill set in these methodologies, you not only meet the demands of the evolving industry but also contribute more effectively to collaborative, fast-paced development environments.

In my opinion, we should look towards developer certified release, where in the tester automates certain use cases and the developer could run the automation script to ensure that the flows are valid. This will also reduce the intervention of teams for any release thereby enabling a smooth deployment. Besides this Tester should always look to cover generic test cases while automating which will not only help a single team but can cover other tech platforms like Android, iOS as well.

Select your candidate of automation wisely. If the features are frequently changing or highly dependent on manual intervension, you will end up spening too much effort in maintainence. Rather focus your effort on a strong foundational framework. Develop smoke test suite and Regression suite parallelly as the features keep growing.

In my experience proactive communication can help you greatly down the line. If you see the rise of this demand communicating your needs could help you get the resources and plans in place to get this implemented.

Communication is the key. The better you understand product, the better you come with an approach. Providing continuous feedback is vital for Agile’s success and any change or update made to code calls not only for functional testing but rigorous regression testing also. With modern day changes, it is always advisable to update with newer technologies that includes automating majority of test cases.

Advocate for a lean testing approach over traditional inefficient methods. Key principles: decouple monolithic codebases into components with clear boundaries, isolate "blast radius" by focusing tests on changed interfaces, replace test phases with continuous targeted tests per layer, incorporate infrastructure/compliance validation. Design modular test architectures providing fast, focused feedback on prioritized risks rather than blindly automating everything. Upfront design minimizes over-testing, reduces flakiness, enables rapid feedback for accelerated delivery. Align testing strategy with system architecture and delivery methodology for efficiency and effectiveness.

Integrate automated smoke testing with your deployment pipeline, so every deployment get somke tested immediately. If you are confident on your automated smoke test result, you can also initiate a automated rollback on test failure.

Take retrospective seriously. Encourage active participation of all team members. If team members are reluctant to open up, conduct meeting keeping management or leadership outside.

I’ve always found it useful to hire a few subject matter experts when jumping into a new technology or development strategy. It is important to pair existing staff with these contracted experts for knowledge transfer and training staff should be included in any contractual agreement and monitored as the transition occurs.