Automation and change management
Kick-starting the Organizational Transformation Journey by Imbibing the Elements of Change Management and Automated Testing!!!
Today, the technological advances are happening at a lightning speed, and our processes need to be well-equipped to contain these changes. With the DevOps practices becoming popular with each passing day, various software are deployed at an increasing frequency. Further, dynamic infrastructure is being created within a matter of minutes with the help of various cloud technologies. Unless our change management procedures adapt well to this scenario, we may be left far behind our competitors in the race to get our product to the market and trigger innovation. Although it is worth knowing the changes happening in the current setting, the methods we adopt to track those changes should align with the speed at which these changes happen.
What is Change Management?
Change management refers to the methods through which an organization defines and applies change in its internal as well as external practices. This necessarily includes preparing as well as supporting the employees, instituting the essential steps needed for the change, and checking the pre-and-post-change actions to ensure that the implementation has been successful.
Bringing about significant changes in the organization can be quite challenging. In fact, it needs co-operation from different levels and may include many independent entities present in an organization. It is crucial to develop a structured methodology for change in order to ensure a favorable transition while alleviating disruption.
In the modern IT field, change management comes in different facades. The project managers perceive change management as a procedure used to get approval for the changes made to the timeline, scope, budget, etc. of a certain project. On the other hand, infrastructure professionals regard change management as a process for approval, testing, and installation of a new equipment, or a new release pertaining to an application, or a cloud instance. However, several others perceive change management from an organizational angle. Though each of these groups foster their own frameworks, approaches, and language, they follow the same model while considering the human context in change management. In the organizational context, ‘change’ denotes any program or event that the company performs that interrupts the daily operations such as digital transformation, ERP installation, and so on.
Change Management and Test Automation – The Win-Win Situation
We often see over hundreds of releases happening on a daily basis through Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD). In order to carry out change management at this speed, you are required to automate the whole process.
An organization’s success is determined by the speed at which quality products are delivered, and therefore it is essential to embrace test automation strategies which help them to achieve this goal. In fact, a suitable test automation approach empowers the organizations to reduce the time-to-market, improve the ROI by minimizing the overall testing efforts, reduce human errors, and augment the release velocity by way of iterations.
A majority of the ITSM tools enable the APIs to easily integrate the CD pipeline with the change management framework. Further, the companies could generate change tickets automatically with the help of these APIs which ensure that a ticket is generated for each change without creating extra burden or interrupting the deployment process. There are so many examples where the tools, the collaboration of culture, and the process framework come together to generate greater value.
Testing has a key role in making the entire change management process successful. In fact, each level of testing starting from unit to integration level is important. The cue lies in performing automation wherever possible, and extending it to the deployment pipeline. With test automation in full swing, the resources could be organized to perform testing which might detect things missed during automated testing, as the latter has a more exploratory nature.
A balance is maintained here from the timeliness perspective, which implies that all these tests are supposed to test the full functionality of the system within the shortest time possible in order to be present in a faster deploying pipeline. Though this balance is different for different teams, it should not take so much time that the teams tend to avoid testing or carry out infrequent releases. At the end of the day, the responsibility lies on the team that develops the code, to maintain this balance. In other words, they should be held accountable for the successful delivery of the code. Once test automation is in place and everything is working fine, these changes can be incorporated as the standard changes and used for seamless deployment to customers.
Are you keen to know how we can help you in your organizational transformation through our test automation approaches and change management procedures? Drop us a line and our experts will be in touch!!!