Optimised QA

Optimising your software quality assurance delivery pipeline

The goal here is to streamline how you test your code from development to production—faster, safer, and with fewer headaches

The Optimised Software Delivery Pipeline:

1. Code Development & Version Control

  • Process: Use a distributed version control system – This one is down to your development team.
    • Align the code deploys to stories for triggering system integrations test suites.
  • Optimisation Tips:
    • Keep commits small and focused for easier reviews and rollbacks, check code in everyday
    • Update the user stories to show when the code is completed and trigger the code availability for testing
    • Trigger automated regression suites aligned with stories

2. Continuous Integration (CI)

  • Process: Automate building and testing every evening following code commits.
    • Run unit tests and static code analysis on every commit
    • Set up a Continuous Integration server (e.g. Jenkins ) to automate the deployment

3. Artifact Management

  • Process: Store build outputs in a repository for consistency and reuse.
  • Optimisation Tips:
    • Tag artefacts with version numbers tied to commits (e.g. versioning: 1.2.3).
    • Clean up old artifacts to save space (e.g., keep last 10 builds).

4. Continuous Deployment (CD) – Staging

  • Process: Automatically deploy passing builds to a staging environment that mirrors production.
    • Use infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools to provision environments.
    • Deploy with zero-downtime techniques (e.g., blue-green deployment, canary releases).
  • Steps:
    1. Deploy to staging.
    2. Run integration tests (API, end-to-end).
    3. Execute performance/load tests if critical.
  • Optimisation Tips:
    • Use feature flags to test in production-like environments without exposing unfinished features.

5. Release to Production

  • Process: Push vetted builds to production with confidence.
    • Decide on manual or automatic triggers:
    • Manual gate: Require approval for compliance or risk-sensitive apps.
  • Optimisation Tips:
    • Use canary releases to roll out to a small user subset first.
    • Maintain a rollback plan (e.g., previous artefacts ready to deploy).
    • Automate version tagging

6. Monitoring & Feedback Loop

  • Process: Continuously observe the system and feed insights back to the team.
    • Track key metrics: error rates, latency, deployment frequency, mean time to recovery (MTTR).
  • Optimisation Tips:
    • Set up alerts for anomalies
    • Conduct post-mortems after incidents to refine the pipeline.
    • Share pipeline performance dashboards with the team