[QA.TEM.6] Enhance developer experience through scalable quality assurance platforms
Category: RECOMMENDED
As team structures and operating models change within the organization to support distributed teams with value stream ownership, the roles and responsibility of quality assurance teams also evolve. In a DevOps environment with supportive team dynamics, individual stream-aligned teams take ownership of quality assurance and security within their value stream and products. This approach removes the handoff of responsibility and accountability to centralized quality assurance or testing teams within the organization. These quality assurance functions are still extremely important to sustainably practicing DevOps and can be distributed to make them more effective in supporting stream-aligned teams.
One method of distributing a centralized quality assurance function is to form platform teams. These platform teams offer scalable testing services to stream-aligned teams to enhance the developer experience and expedite test environment set up. Platforms managed by these teams can feature self-service options, automated test environment management, test bed provisioning, and equipping teams with the tools to produce, manage, and use test data and infrastructure. Additionally, these platforms can integrate device farms, allowing for testing across a variety of devices such as mobile phones or web browsers such as Chrome and Firefox on diverse operating systems.
Quality assurance platforms can also be created to provide security related capabilities which enable continuous visibility into the security posture of applications throughout the development lifecycle, such as Application Security Posture Management (ASPM). Stream-aligned teams can leverage these capabilities to prioritize and address vulnerabilities identified during testing, contributing to overall risk reduction and improved application security. By providing a platform for consistent testing procedures and security controls, quality assurance platform teams can help support the organization's observability and automated governance goals.
Another method of distributing quality assurance teams is to form enabling teams. These teams can help stream-aligned teams onboard to quality assurance platforms and teach teams to become self-sufficient with test design and execution. It is important that enabling teams do not take ownership over testing for a value stream or product. They provide just-in-time guidance and knowledge sharing, but ultimately move on to help other teams. If long-term quality assurance support is needed within a development team, cross-train the quality assurance member so that they gain development skills and permanently embed them into the stream-aligned team.
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