DevOps is one of the newest and largest movements in Information Technology in the past few years. The name DevOps is a portmanteau of “Development” and “Operations” and is meant to denote a fusion of these two functions in a company. Whether or not your business actually does combine the two functions, the lessons and tools learned from the DevOps movement and attitude can be applied throughout the entire Information Technology space. This eBook focuses on one of the key attributes of the DevOps movement: Quality Assurance. At any point, you should be able to release your product, code or configuration—so long as you continue keeping your deliverables in a deployable state. This is done by “slowing down” to include a Quality Assurance step at each point in your workflow. The sooner you catch an error or trouble condition and fix it, the faster you can get back on track. This will lower the amount of rework required and keep your team’s momentum going in a forward direction, enabling your group to move on to new projects and challenges.

This eBook dives in to some topics that cross both DevOps and Quality Assurance boundaries. Some of them may apply to you and your organization, and others may not. The goal here is to get you to start thinking about how you can begin injecting Quality Assurance steps into your daily workflow. This eBook also covers some general best practices for a DevOps (or traditional operations organization) and how a Quality Assurance step in conjunction with those best practices can help catch and eliminate errors earlier.

Taking the extra time to do a Continuous Quality Assurance check as a part of your workflow, while it’s in flight, may indeed slow you down along the way, but by keeping quality high and rework down to an absolute minimum, you can avoid repeating steps later on—and that’s how you speed up over the long haul (see “DevOpsDays Silicon Valley: Continuous Quality” http://www.serena.com/blog/2013/07/ devopsdays-silicon-valley-continuous-quality).