Build a Continuous QA Strategy around your CI/CD Pipeline

Designing a sustainable CI/CD pipeline is a team effort. Understanding how a Test Strategy in DevOps is mapped and reflected in the CI/CD pipeline is key to support sustainable development and team cohesion. But it is not only about Test Automation, but how built-in quality can be achieved in all steps of the SW development, within and outside of your CI/CD pipeline. This is a whole team exercise, involving all stakeholders.

What is the goal of your testing? What quality aspects are more and what are less important for your domain? What are the major risks? What deployment and testing steps should be included in a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline, and where to focus with Exploratory Testing? How to utilize the new QA opportunities available by applying DevOps practices? Don’t just string together existing manual processes! – in this tutorial, we will use simple, collaborative tools to design something better!

In this tutorial for teams of 5-6 people, we will use several card games (Test Sphere and PipelineGame), as well as Sticky notes to identify parts of a Test Strategy and to design a sustainable CI/CD pipeline into its core. (however, we do not use actual CI/CD tools as the technical implementation of the pipeline is not the scope here).

The format is a series of lectures and discussions to share the needed theory and exercises to practice what we have learned. Throughout the exercises, teams will understand how to define a Test Strategy for a pre-selected scenarios, and how to design a CI/CD pipeline that implements the Test Strategy. Each team will present their solutions, giving the chance to the whole class to learn from each other.