DevOps is the newest best practice philosophy for software development processes. In short, DevOps (Development and Operations) is an approach based on lean and agile principles in which business owners and the development, operations, and quality assurance departments collaborate to deliver software in a continuous manner that enables the business to more quickly seize market opportunities and reduce the time to include customer feedback. IBM sees DevOps as a business-driven approach to software delivery.

Service virtualisation simulates the behavior of select components within an application to enable end-to-end testing of the application as a whole. Test environments can use virtual services in lieu of the production services to conduct integration testing earlier in the development process, helping companies create more efficient testing environments by eliminating many of the roadblocks that testing teams typically encounter.

The Continuous Testing for Dummies is a limited edition e-book from IBM that explains the basics and features of continuous testing, a DevOps practice area, and one of the most ardently followed software quality assurance processes today. Continuous testing is defined as the process of continually executing automated tests throughout the software delivery lifecycle so that teams can identify potential risk areas well in advance during the development stage itself, leading to faster release cycles and better software quality.