How To Shift-Right in DevOps with Test Automation
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Accelerating software delivery is a challenge.
The DevOps paradigm contributed to foster an ecosystem in which software changes are more rapidly delivered to production.
But that acceleration increases the risk of introducing defects that can be caught during development and operations phases.
That’s where the Shift-Right paradigm is useful, focusing on improving the product quality by acting on the end of the software lifecycle, near its operations.
This article shares the Shift-right practices that can be implemented with test automation to contribute to the acceleration of valuable software.
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Enrich test techniques before production
One important environment similar yet still before production is the staging or pre-production environment.
Cloud technologies ease the implementation of such environments enabling more teams to enrich their test techniques at that stage.
Different types of performance, security test, among others can be performed at that stage to detect issues in an environment much more similar to the production one.
Teams can start by manually launching the set of automated tests, even if their goal is to fully automate their execution before gradually releasing the software.
Add post-deployment sanity checks
Once a new version of an application is deployed in production, one vital question must be answered fast: “Is the application working as expected”?
Companies cannot wait for real traffic to verify the effectiveness of the delivered software changes; they need a solution to quickly assess the state of the delivery.
Sanity checks are usually a minimal set of automated tests that once executed, guarantee that the essential services of the application are working as expected.
They are quite useful when automatically triggered after the deployment in a specific environment, before relying on monitoring.
