3 Ways TestOps Helps Us Scale Automation at ThoughtExchange
As our teams and tests quickly grew at ThoughtExchange, we knew that we needed a solution to help us scale quality across our orgs. In this blog, I will share concrete steps for how Testim’s latest feature, TestOps, has helped us deliver an amazing user experience for our users at ThoughtExchange.
How TestOps Helps Celebrate Your Small Wins
TestOps is the discipline of managing and scaling test automation to maximize efficiency, delivery speed and application quality. To apply TestOps to our testing and teams, we first needed to standardize our internal processes. As part of our whole team approach to software quality, each team member was involved. Once we all agreed on the standards of the process, we started measuring small wins in our test automation implementation. I created a few test cases in my own branch, ran them a bunch of times and once confidence in consistency was achieved, I moved them to the master branch. I then added them to our CI and just like that, we instantly succeeded!
We believe in celebrating the small wins in our teams, calling out each team member’s involvement, and most importantly prepping for our next stage in our TestOps implementation. As leaders, remember that during this remote work era, celebrating your team’s small wins is critical, especially during your burnout time at the end of sprints. Another huge benefit of it is as we celebrate together, we gain more buy-in from our teams.
Take one small step at a time and aim for success. All these small successes turn into one huge win in your journey to continuous quality. That is our quality mantra at ThoughtExchange!
Here are the 3 key ways that TestOps helps us scale our software quality using control, management, and insights.
Control:
Want this airview? Yeah, so do our teams. We needed these robust controls and most importantly, we needed to know how to use them. TestOps from Testim had us covered. We are constantly adding new and updated features for our customers. TestOps gives you control by:
- Branching with conflict resolution. You can see the difference between your branch with application code, resolve the conflict if there is any, and cherry-pick what you want to merge.
- Read-only master branch: One of my favorite aspects of TestOps is the secure master branch from unwanted or unauthorized changes.
- Pull requests with approvers: Newly created tests and updated test changes can be submitted for pull requests, waiting for approval from SMEs.
Management:
When we write the test cases, the test writer and the team need to know the status of our tests. TestOps gives us the opportunity to know and provide this information in one glance. Test statuses are displayed in the Test Library list and in the Test Editor.
What is my test status?
1.1 Draft status means the tester is working on it.
1.2 Evaluating — This is the phase where we evaluate the test until we gain the confidence that it is consistent. For example, we will be executing this test in the CI but if it fails, no problem — it doesn’t fail the build. We figure out if the test has found a bug or it has failed for another reason.
1.3 Active — Test has moved from Evaluating Status to active, as we have gained trust on it. Ready to connect to CI.
1.4 Quarantine — This status tells us that either test is broken, or the test has found a bug in the app. Fix it!
Your next step? Assign a test owner. Assigning the test owner helps to balance workload, prevent overlaps, and show responsibility of teammates.
TestOps easy view of your test library and shared test library helps improve coordination and test architecture. In addition, these aspects of TestOps provide quick access in Testim’s visual editor to facilitate reuse of your tests.
Insights:
This is the time where we figure out our lessons learned. Here are the key takeaways that I have learned when using TestOps to take us across our latest sprint finish line:
- Failure trends: Identify troublesome tests and failure types to improve the measures.
- Duplication levels: Replace the duplication of tests with reusable groups to improve test architecture and reduce future maintenance.
- Mechanism for Celebration: Include everyone and inspire supporters. During a pandemic, it can be challenging to find ways to celebrate together as we work apart, but we can always find solutions to do that. TestOps did this for us.
TestOps continues to help us scale our test automation efforts at ThoughtExchange, improve our team’s confidence on our tests, and most importantly, connect our teams while apart. Remember how important it is to celebrate the small wins and achieve big success as a team. Sometimes an automation solution can help you do just that. I hope this blog helps you and your teams organization to achieve the same wins that we have had at ThoughtExchange.
Read my previous blog, 7 Lessons That I Learned at Testim’s Lightning Talks that was featured in Software Testing Weekly here.
