In a decade since its conception and introduction to the industry, DevOps has yielded unimaginable results. An extension of Agile, DevOps has emerged as an optimal solution to building coordinated and collaborative products that reach the markets faster than ever before; bidding a joyful goodbye to the orthodox waterfall software development. Thanks to this innovative methodology, the IT teams are accommodating complex business scenarios.
But the rise of DevOps like any other new solution has not been free from discrepancies. Security, being a persistent problem from the start, is increasingly hitting the headlines, bringing to light the immediate corrective response organizations need to take for securing the future of their application and software development.
This HP report clearly shows that most respondents are looking for DevOps to improve application security. More than 17% of the respondents agree that they are not leveraging technologies to protect their applications and most organizations are only relying on pre-production penetration testing and network security technologies, which are definitely not enough.
This is where DevSecOps plays an instrumental role and is slowly becoming the norm in the industry. DevSecOps can be regarded as a security-focused software development life cycle (SDLC) with a “continuous everything” approach. Built on the learnings and best practices of DevOps, DevSecOps promotes penetration testing and active security audits into agile development, thus, advocating that security must not be applied at a later stage but must be built-in during the development of the product. This means breaking away any departmental or thinking silos and bringing together all the teams to share the responsibility and accountability towards the security of software products.
Continuous Testing – A Critical Part of DevSecOps
Continuous Testing (CT) is a part of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) processes for DevSecOps and is the pillar for continuous quality engineering.
Automated testing, test-driven development, and thorough code scanning are integral to providing continuous insights into the state of the applications after they are deployed. Hence, a strong emphasis on continuous testing is necessary to deliver accurate and secure software further allowing a seamless user experience.
Role of Continuous Testing
Continuous testing collaborates automated testing and methodologies of Agile testing/development to offer a better and continuous quality of software. Its collaborative nature has undoubtedly made it the central focus for all the teams involved throughout the SDLC process to deliver effective, secured, and more efficient products. Enabling a continuous testing process helps in realizing all the core pillars of DevSecOps like:
- Accelerated development and faster deployment into the market
- Flawless delivery
- Enhanced efficiency
- A holistic view of the application quality
- Collective responsibility
- Pragmatic implementation
- Improved monitoring and reporting
Accelerating DevSecOps Pipelines with Continuous Testing as an Enabler
The key goal of continuous testing is to actively eliminate meaningless activities and provide an automated and unobtrusive way to gain simultaneous feedback on security risks involved with software deployment. It acts as a guide to the DevOps teams to fulfill all security requirements while improving quality and driving faster development to enable successful software release.
As a DevSecOps enabler, continuous testing executes all the sets of tests driven by CI/CD processes. The real beauty of CT lies in its extraordinary capabilities to indicate defects and its associated business risks, if any, along with exposing all similar defects that might have been already introduced in the process.
The critical advantages of continuous and automated testing include:
- Continuous quality approach: Enabling continuous testing facilitates a central view of quality throughout the process providing immediate access to feedback and checking whether all security requirements are satisfied or not ensuring that the team leaders and project managers make informed decisions.
- Reduced business risks: With the benefit of instantaneous assessment of the software responses and more accurate “go/no go” decisions, the business risks of a fully automated continuous delivery process are significantly reduced allowing more efficient releases.
- On-spot defect elimination: A key principle of the Shift Left Testing approach, continuous testing methodologies detect defects and discrepancies at the source where they are the easiest, fastest, and cheapest to fix allowing cost-effective and accelerated development and delivery processes.
- Future ease of processes: Continuous assessment and measurement allow the development teams to gain an understanding and refine the future software development processes along with breaking the departmental silos, enabling improved coordination and communication amongst teams.
Conclusion
No matter the scale or size of the organization and the type of software it requires, security compliance is a crucial factor for every modern organization today and DevSecOps as an extension of DevOps emerges as the ideal solution to ensure security and reliability of software products. Promotion and adoption of built-in security as a mantra and a model to strive for through continuous testing and continuous delivery processes can ensure superior quality every time. Knowing the right set of continuous testing tools can streamline testing processes and become enablers and not inhibitors in faster delivery and deployment processes of software and application products. Continuous everything coupled with the assurance of security ensures more productive software delivery processes.
Maveric’s transformative and scalable continuous quality solutions are powered by a firm domain connect. For every unique customer requirement, our specialists conduct an in-depth analysis, take a design thinking approach, build a prototype solution, thoroughly test it before deployment, and facilitate consistent improvement measures to maintain continuous quality. The 95% QE automation protocol at Maveric, deploys cognitive computing and predictive analytics for intelligent automation, evident in our platform, tools, accelerators, and matured frameworks. With us, you experience solutions engineered for blazing speed and scale, at constant quality.
