For any DevOps initiative to succeed, starting with the right foundations is imperative. Without it, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle from the get-go. As for Azure DevOps, it’s best to follow these best practices as part of your rollout:

Conceptualize the Application Design Process

Whether you build a new application or improve on an existing one, the design/architecture remains fundamental to its success. It sets operational standards and assures reusability and scalability. 

With Azure DevOps, you have the facility to architect your application from the ground up. But this requires you to define interoperability between different Azure components and other cloud services. 

For instance, you’ll have to pay attention to how the ACCELQ test automation plugin could reinforce Azure Pipelines’ continuous delivery capabilities. 

This serves to remove operational silos and opens the door to holistic, end-to-end pipeline management. More so, it advocates for robust application design.

Rely on Automated Tests to Optimize Productivity

Every legacy application has some amount of manual testing that you need to do during regression cycles. However, using automated tests as a part of your infrastructure helps you cut down your test cycle time in half (and even less). It also reduces future maintenance costs and manages errors throughout the product lifecycle. 

Microsoft affirms that test automation allows re-running “a few tests that failed due to test infrastructure issues” alongside empowering testers to seamlessly run “tests in Build or Release workflows.” In their State of Test Automation Survey 2022, Simform alludes to respondents reporting immense use of test automation for functional testing (66.5%), API testing (54.2%), and regression testing (50.5%). 

No doubt, such capabilities bode well for DevOps. They also bolster the general effectiveness of automated tests by allowing testers to focus more on code coverage, thereby amplifying the value of testing efforts. It’s noteworthy to mention that this essentially empowers your QA teams to focus more on the business logic of your application. Sooner than later, they’re able to gauge the end-user experience effectively.

Ensure an Agile Process

Azure DevOps is best suited for ensuring adherence to the Agile Manifesto. That’s because it provides the foundation for agile delivery, with highly configurable workflows and flexibility in build and release management. 

High-configurability means that you can define teams and workflows according to your specific needs against certain value streams. And that paves the way for effective sprint planning, a thorough review of project deliverables, effective work-item dependency management, better forecasts, and so on. 

In essence, Azure DevOps lets you devise an agile process tailored to your specific requirements and values. This can help you improve operational efficiency and solve the challenges of having many teams working together.

Azure pipelines are explicitly designed to enable CI/CD to increase code coverage, repeatedly run tests, and deploy code automatically. 

ACCELQ provides test automation and test coverage plugins to make full use of Azure Pipelines’ robust capabilities. Plus, it enables test automation to be used as the backbone for CI/CD across different stages of product lifecycle management. 

For instance, the ACCELQ Azure CI Connect plugin immediately lets you add ACCELQ automation as a job in the pipeline. As a result, you can ensure that your tests execute as part of your workflow.

Likewise, the ACCELQ Connect plugin provides comprehensive real-time insights into the tests specific to every user story. These could include information about both manual and automated tests, their execution status, etc. 

The good thing is that these plugins can be downloaded and installed on the go (in 3-4 simple steps) and can be integrated directly into different project types. No need to waste time with the maintenance and development of test scripts, not to mention the overhead costs. 

All in all, they lay the foundation for introducing a test automation strategy that can be scaled across your DevOps ecosystem. So, you could very well apply them as part of your Azure DevOps implementation.

The significance of Azure DevOps cannot be understated, given the vast number of businesses turning to it to get their DevOps initiative going. It’s best to get it up and running as quickly as possible, followed by scaling it over time to achieve desired results.

By harnessing the combined capabilities of Azure DevOps and ACCELQ, you can:

• Optimize test design and development time for effortless automated test execution
• Improve efficiency in managing product releases and code deployments
• Simplify the maintenance and management of testing efforts
• Deliver significant value to your end customers with faster and more reliable applications

Make sure to connect with us regarding testing automation in Azure DevOps! We would be glad to hear from you and help you find the right solution.