One of the major trends in software testing lately is the adoption of Agile and DevOps.

When Brendan O’Leary, Senior Development Evangelist at GitLab, was asked what testing best practices he recommends to avoid release delays, he, said, “The more you can consolidate, automate and integrate testing into your entire DevOps flow, the bigger the dividends will be.”

When testers use disparate tools to create and run tests, and developers use different tools for product deployment, the proliferation of different tools makes it difficult for organizations to create a unified DevOps flow where teams can more easily collaborate and share information. As a result, these organizations often find that testers and developers duplicate efforts and work on different goals.

O’Leary also recommends starting with automated testing rather than including it in the latter stages. According to him, “While it may be a preliminary investment to start with, the benefit will be that once you have an automated testing program in place, it will be much easier to repeat than to start from scratch.

If you have a solid foundation, such as a deployment pipeline with automated testing, it’s much easier to integrate additional testing tools for specific use cases. This is where DevOps practices can help accelerate the overall development cycle and improve software delivery performance .