Improve Testing with Infrastructure Automation
A saying often used in the world of project management is, you can have it done quickly, you can have it done cheaply, or you can have it done correctly, but you can only pick two. For example, if you need it done quickly and correctly, you can hire highly skilled people, but it’s likely your project will no longer be in the “cheap” category.
This adage is also true for software development—or at least it used to be. New tools that allow organizations to “shift left” have given businesses the ability to pick not just two, but all three to achieve quality, efficiency, and velocity.
How to Achieve Velocity, Cut Costs, and Ensure Software Quality
Velocity
Obviously, the Quality Assurance (QA) process is a critical component of software development, but it is often the first thing eliminated when it’s necessary to speed releases. Orchestrating the necessary environments to fulfill testing requirements throughout the software development lifecycle can also be time consuming and requires a high level of skill to orchestrate a production-like environment.
Automating the provisioning of test environments and making them more quickly available to testers relieves time constraints and helps facilitate earlier testing cycles throughout the development process.
Cost
Testing software early in the development process saves costs because uncovering and correcting bugs during the dev and maintenance phases can be trickier and more time consuming. But manual processes for testing can not only be slow and burdensome, but they can also be expensive especially if you need to pay additional people who have the expertise to configure and provision test environments.
If time is money, then automating environment orchestration for testing can save significant costs, increase productivity, and can lead to a shift-left approach.
Quality
To ensure the quality of software throughout the development process, it’s critical to execute tests at different phases as releases progress through the CI/CD pipeline, particularly early in the dev/test process. Test environments utilized at all stages of the process must accurately replicate the production environment in which the application will be deployed to minimize errors. However, the growing complexity of infrastructure makes spinning up realistic, production-like environments early in the development and test cycles difficult and costly.
Infrastructure automation tools can provide features for blueprinting environments that meet the necessary requirements for production-like test environments which helps ensure consistency throughout the entire dev/test process, improving the quality of the end product.
While in the past, it’s been nearly impossible to achieve the three pillars of product development—velocity, cost, and quality—it’s more crucial than ever in order to compete in the modern technological landscape. Now, with the right tools, it is possible to do so. Click the button below to learn more about automating test environments with Quali.