Who is responsible for deploying code to test environments in your company?
Is it an automated process? Or is it a manual one? I appreciate that not everyone has a CI pipeline setup!
In my last company, it was an automated process. In the company before that, it was a manual process done by the dev who had been working on the most recent feature. They would then let me know that they had deployed the code and that I could pull the code down to test on my machine.
It’s automated for us, but we don’t have a separate testing role. If we push code to a test branch then it automatically deploys to our test environment.
In my last place it was automated to an extent, but the people actively working on the test environment (whether it be testers or developers) had to manually approve changes into the environment.
As a tester I worked in an agile team in a company. I executed the majority of the tests. The developers jumped in, if there were too many work items in the Test column. In order to minimise the interference of other users there was a table on the white board. This contained the names of all test environments and their temporary owners.
After a developer had told me a ticket was ready for testing, I would assign a test environment to myself. Then I would use a CI/CD pipeline to deploy the right version in the test environment. At the end of the test I would wipe out my name after the test environment in the table of the whiteboard. The same process also applied for the developers.
In this company the temporary owner was responsible for changes in her of his test environment.
Deploying code is done via CI/CD.
But I’m a huge advocate for the testing team to own CI/CD. I understand that it can be a bit complicated. I’m not saying the testing team has to do everything, but with contribution from developers, the testing team should own it as a process. The value that this mindset can provide is immense.
Very much the developers. At the start of my time with the company (too long ago) there was talk of the idea of the tester also as a deployment engineer who takes a CD (remember those?) and installs everything on target hardware. It never happened. There was never really enough of a business case for simplifying installation to that level.