How to Accelerate Network DevOps

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Accelerate Network DevOps With Continuous Testing

Network equipment and software teams adopt DevOps to deliver more releases with higher quality at lower cost. Continuous testing verifies every code and infrastructure change as it moves through the pipeline, from CI builds through nightly regression and release acceptance. Without it, continuous delivery is not reliable. The workflow starts with an assessment of current practices: how tests are selected, how much regression testing is automated, whether CI builds run against clones of production configurations, and whether test resources scale with demand. Teams then set business goals, such as monthly releases and fewer escalations, and technical goals for build, regression, and release test times.

Common challenges stand in the way. Development centers operate separate branches and labs, creating distributed silos and long serial build, test, and release cycles. Automated test coverage is often below 50%, and existing automation can be inflexible and unstable. Departments use inconsistent metrics, and false failures make results hard to act on. Development and operations have competing priorities for agility and stability. In one case, a manufacturer with more than 36 million lines of code released fewer than twice per year, build tests failed 50% of the time, and 75% of engineering time went to corrective work. Teams need modular test suites, shared lab infrastructure, CI orchestration, elastic resources, and consistent dashboards.

Network DevOps Acceleration Solution

Keysight combines lab automation, test automation, and DevOps implementation expertise to build continuous testing into the delivery pipeline. Velocity Core centralizes physical and virtual test labs and provisions the topologies each pipeline stage requires, integrating with CI orchestration tools such as Jenkins. Velocity iTest supports authoring, managing, and executing reusable automated test suites across product variations and topologies. Keysight experts guide adoption in three phases: infrastructure, to integrate tools and establish metrics; scale-up, to modularize tests and add elastic resources; and accelerate, to shorten CI and delivery cycles. For a major network equipment manufacturer, Keysight's solution achieved 99% build, test, and release automation, cut build and test time from 46 hours to one hour, and reduced release testing from four weeks to 24 hours.

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