Testers need to find important information about product quality and present it in a way that can be acted upon. As the people building the software, developers are in a great position to observe the product. By monitoring the test environment and conducting unit testing, they can help inform about product quality.

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.