QA Ops is the next-level process of DevOps and is integral to the development and delivery operations. Its prime objective is to introduce quality from the onset of any project and ensure that all defined quality norms are followed throughout the development and delivery process.

QA Ops framework is the interlinking of three major processes of the development and delivery cycle – Quality Assurance, Development, and Delivery. This further implies that the concerned teams have to strive for continuous improvement to ensure that a high-quality product is delivered to the customers. Everyone involved from the conceptualization to realization of the application is accountable for maintaining the quality throughout the process.

The success of QA Ops is based on a higher level of collaboration and communication between all the stakeholders. The QA engineers need to work closely with the development team and operations team to decide on QA strategies and make sure that they are followed stringently.

In simple words, QA Ops helps in integrating continuous testing in CI/CD pipeline.

4 Key elements of QA Ops

The following diagram represents 4 key elements that need to be incorporated to embed QA in the core of operations.

•  Automation
  Automation accelerates the quality feedback loop, by creating, executing, modifying, and self-healing the test suites. Every build has to undergo functional testing, performance testing, and smoke testing, besides the customized set of tests specific for the module under test. Conducting these tests can be challenging if not conducted smartly.
  Intelligent automation can save precious man-hours and costs by fast-tracking the whole testing process.

• Parallel testing
  Parallel testing involves executing multiple test cases on a module across various test setups in tandem, at the same time. Needless to say, these tests have to be automated for ideal parallel testing.
• 
  Parallel testing is important to save time and accelerate the CI/CD pipeline by identifying any flaky tests. The involvement of all the teams ensures that these tests are immediately traced back to their origin and appropriate action is taken.

•  Scalability
  Scalability aids in determining the application’s performance under varying load conditions. QA Ops requires to have a test framework and infrastructure in place to conduct scalability testing as and when required.

•  Integrating development and QA with operations
  The QA team, the development team, and the operations team need to work together to define the whole QA Ops framework. Involving all the stakeholders from the beginning ensures that clear quality processes are defined from requirement understanding to delivery. Read For More: Intelligent test automation