There is no debate on the efficacy of a shift-left approach to performance testing. Integrating performance testing into your DevOps environment ensures continuous monitoring and improvement in the reliability and functionality of your software build.
But this integration is easier said than done. Embedding these workflows results in teams grappling with challenges that range from managing people to competing priorities. So, if you are on this journey, this one’s for you and your teams. In this blog post, we discuss the three major hurdles your team might be dealing with and their pragmatic solutions.
Managing the Mindset Shift – Collaboration. Accountability and Shared Ownership
Let’s face it. Changing people is more complicated than overhauling processes. Embedding performance testing practices and principles into your DevOps methodology requires multiple teams to work closely to ensure that
- Knowledge transfer is seamless
- Iterations are faster
- Accountability is uniform
- Ownership is shared
The focus shifts to continuous performance monitoring and improvement across the development cycle. This has multiple consequences for teams.
Now they have to work on shorter feedback loops, embrace the mindset of continuous monitoring and improvement and need to prioritize performance as a critical metric.
Challenge #1: Bridging the difference in priorities, way of work, tools used and understanding across teams.
Solution: This begins with
– Bringing everyone on the same plane so that they know the why behind this integration and their stake in ensuring its success. This should also accompany giving them enough clarity on their role in the new workflow by empowering them with the technical and business understanding of performance testing.
– Exhaustive and documented view of the entire DevOps process for all stakeholders to ensure ample visibility at each step. This comprehensive view enables teams to align their planning and execution to accommodate different priorities while ensuring adherence to delivery schedules with uncompromising quality standards. It also ensures seamless insight sharing by maintaining a uniform standard of the language used, the tech stack employed, and the methodologies at play to arrive at common performance goals. While team-specific tools and priorities may still need to be met, ensuring that they are seamlessly incorporated into this setup will guarantee the success of the entire arrangement.
– Streamlining reuse of testing artifacts to ensure consistency in approach, process understanding, and results across the DevOps cycle. Errors and misalignments reduce, and achieving greater coherence with the pre-defined goals becomes more effortless.
Get expert insights on what goes down.
Where’s the skill? Hire, Train or Partner
Successful integration of performance testing into your DevOps unilaterally depends on whether you have the right experts. Often organizations employ their regular testers or QA engineers to integrate it with their DevOps workflow and end up with poorly performing software products, wondering what went wrong.
Performance testing requires a tester to have a very nuanced understanding of the product and its varied use cases to be able to
- Select the right tech stack
- Design the appropriate architecture
- Build realistic test environments
- Cover all possible scenarios beyond the mere technical functionality
- Document exhaustively
- Analyze test results for futuristic insights
- Persistently refine the testing approach
Add to this the complexity of integrating this workflow into DevOps for continuous performance monitoring and improvement. And we know the scope has expanded from performance testing to engineering!
Challenge #2: Lack of skilled performance engineers to drive this integration
Solution: The solution depends on several factors critical to your business: the budget allocated, the scale you aim at, and your time constraints.
– In an ideal world where you don’t have resource constraints, it’s best to hire the right experts for this job. Finalizing the most skillful ones may be time-consuming, but it would be worthwhile.
– In a more realistic scenario, collaborating with seasoned QE providers who display shared ownership for delivery and ensure full accountability for outcomes is more cost-effective and pragmatic. This model ensures that you can leverage their expertise to deliver a high-performing product, operate within your constraints, adhere to your delivery schedules, and are also able to utilize their guidance and experience to augment your organizational QE capabilities.
You can opt for a middle ground by training your in-house team. But the challenge with this approach is the need to stay updated which puts humongous pressure on teams to learn, unlearn and re-learn constantly. It also leads to productivity loss and results in a distracted workforce.
The Privacy-Integrity Puzzle: Thread the needle
Now that you have conquered the mindset, got the right people at work, and have teams collaborate smoothly, you should start integrating performance testing into your DevOps journey. This is possible if only you have put ample privacy and security measures around your test data and environment to ensure compliance with privacy regulations. However, implementing these measures hinders your testing team’s ability to replicate real-world scenarios and consequently impacts the quality of testing efforts.
Challenge #3: Balancing data security with its integrity for accurate testing
Solution: It begins with creating awareness among your teams about the importance of complying with data security regulations and maintaining data integrity for realistic test results. This stage leads the way forward and distributes accountability across teams when done effectively.The following steps involve
- Implementing detailed policies around test data and environment security
- Providing controlled access to teams based on their roles
- Securing the data storage and transmission workflows
- Maintaining meticulous documentation to facilitate audits and assessments.
Following these guidelines manually becomes daunting when handling complex scenarios and large, interconnected workflows. This is when automation makes more sense to ensure consistency, accuracy, and reliability.
Whether your team is articulating the exact challenge(s) or only highlighting the symptoms, it’s important to conquer it because the consequences of letting the problem grow can be disastrous for your end user, business and revenue.
One of the major promises of DevOps is the speed of delivery. The critical struggle for organizations is balancing it with superior quality and performance. With continuous improvement and monitoring, achieving this feat is possible, provided the wrinkles on the way have been ironed out. So, what stage are you in?