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.

Some say test-driven development may work well initially, but as soon as we start to refactor our code, it breaks old tests and requires us to write new ones. This is not the fault of TDD; it’s the way we’re using it. TDD remains a valuable way to verify code as we write it, so we need to repair our test-driven damage.

As modern software processes become automated, one might argue that nearly everything in software development is code. Obviously, our software applications are comprised of code, but that’s only the start of it. Our tests, delivery orchestration, and someday even our software production could be automated.