Testing plays an important role in the DevOps lifecycle. DevOps practices like continuous integration and delivery support frequent software releases and make testing crucial to maintain software quality.
DevOps adopts an approach that includes testing in the earlier parts of the software development to identify bugs in the initial stages.
It is a continuous process that spans every stage of the software development lifecycle that ensures faster delivery of software.
Every step of Software Development includes different testing forms which help in minimizing backtracking in case a bug or an error occurs.
Over time, faster and more collaborative tools have been developed for software testing.
Let’s explore the top DevOps tools for testing:
1. Apache JMeter
Apache Jmeter is a load-testing tool that can simulate heavy loads on single or multiple servers to test their strength.
It works to test the limits of an application by simulating a group of users sending requests to the server and uses visual diagrams to return the statistics back to the user.
Benefits:
- Apart from load tests, it can be used to perform spike, unit, and performance tests.
- It is an open source-based code – hence it is easily scalable.
- It uses log files, charts, graphs, etc to display test results.
- It offers plugin support for browsers.
- It has a user-friendly graphical interface.
- It offers support for multiple types of tests
2. Selenium
Selenium is one of the popular automated DevOps tools for testing since it is capable of interacting with the browser’s web applications and web elements.
It eliminates the need for any intermediary software or device by using browser native support that directly interacts with the browser.
Further, it supports multiple programming languages like Java, C#, Python, Perl, and Ruby which means that you can write your automation script using the language you’re most comfortable with.
Benefits:
- It uses a component called WebDriver for automated web testing that can carry out quicker test cases compared to other tools. WebDriver also helps solve issues in automated testing and challenges faced by complex web elements like dropdowns and alerts through its dynamic locators.
- It is portable and can work with any Operating System like Linux, Windows, Mac, etc.
- No need for server installation – it interacts with the browser directly!
- It uses Domain Specific Language, which contains up to 200 commands, for testing web applications and also allows the user to record those tests through the browser.
- It offers support for multiple browsers like IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, etc.
3. JUnit
Because of its friendly functionality, JUnit is a popular tool for testing Java applications. It is used to check app functionality to make sure it runs according to its requirement through unit testing.
It works on the principle of ‘first test, then code’ by building test data for a part of the code, which is tested and then implemented.
This improves debugging time of the code and improves its stability.
Benefits:
- It provides annotations that help in determining testing methods.
- It provides assertions to help determine results.
- It supports multiple types of test runners to run functional tests.
- The tests run automatically and provide immediate feedback. They also check their own results, reducing manual work.
- Codes can be written faster using JUnit tests.
Conclusion
The software development life cycle requires optimization of time, expenses, and manual efforts that can be achieved with automated testing.
With the implementation of DevOps tools for testing, testing has become a continuous process that ensures faster software delivery.
It focuses on the continuous development approach, where the code is built, deployed, tested, and implemented. All these actions are automated, which enhances their speed and agility.
DevOps is the future — it is key to delivering high-quality software. It automates and tracks the flow of features right from the stage of their check-in to their delivery.
For that, DevOps depends on controllability and visibility in the entire process. DevOps tools help the operation to proceed without any human support or intervention.
