The focus on automation and “continuous everything,” from integration, deployment, and now all the buzz about continuous testing, makes the daily activities of a tester in DevOps challenging. Testers may be used to controlling quality—or thinking they do—but they need to pivot to assuring their teams focus on quality.

If you have an important implementation date, early identification of the minimum viable product is a vital risk-management step that helps focus your team’s attention on what's important. Rather than apologizing for intelligent phasing of functionality to manage risk, explain it to stakeholders and take credit.

Have you ever had to ask whether your defect fix was deployed to a particular environment? You shouldn’t need to, because the answer should always be readily available. Having to request information on the status of your defect fix indicates inefficiencies and a lack of maturity within your organization’s process.