CI/CD & DevOps
DevOps
A culture and practice of collaboration between development and operations, automating the software delivery pipeline.
Full definition
DevOps is a set of practices combining software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the development lifecycle and deliver high-quality software continuously.
DevOps practices:
- Continuous Integration: Automated build and test on every commit
- Continuous Delivery/Deployment: Automated path to production
- Infrastructure as Code: Version-controlled infrastructure
- Monitoring and Logging: Observability in production
- Containerization: Docker, Kubernetes
- Microservices: Small, independent services
QA's role in DevOps:
- Maintain automated test suites in CI/CD
- Define quality gates (tests must pass before deployment)
- Monitor production for quality issues
- Participate in incident response
- Ensure test environments match production (containers)
DevOps + QA = 'DevTestOps' or 'Quality Engineering':
- QA is embedded in the pipeline, not a separate phase
- Testing is automated and continuous
- Quality is everyone's responsibility
- Monitoring is testing in production
DevOps knowledge is increasingly important for QA engineers — understanding CI/CD, Docker, and monitoring makes you more valuable to the team.