This article is based on reporting originally published on TechRepublic, drawing on findings from a Forrester study commissioned by Tricentis.
Speed Without Quality Is a Race to the Bottom
One of the most common mistakes organizations make when adopting DevOps is treating it purely as a velocity play. They invest in CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and automation—and then discover that shipping faster simply means shipping broken software faster. A Forrester study commissioned by Tricentis examined 94 quality metrics across four categories and found that for automation to deliver real value in a DevOps context, teams must track quality throughout every stage of development and deployment.
Clark Golestani, managing director of C Sensei Group, put it plainly: “Organizations adopt DevOps to accelerate the delivery of innovative software that creates positive user experiences. If you start accelerating delivery without also rethinking your approach to quality, you will end up rapidly delivering updates that drive your customers to competitors.”
The research also highlighted a distinction in how DevOps leaders approach measurement. Some focus on contextual metrics—which tie quality signals to business outcomes—while others rely on counting metrics, such as defect counts or test pass rates. Similarly, some teams measure user experience across an end-to-end journey, while others focus on application-specific interactions. Understanding which approach fits your organization’s maturity and risk profile is itself a leadership skill.
5 Practices That Define Effective DevOps Leaders
Whether you are establishing yourself as a DevOps leader or looking to sharpen your existing practice, these five disciplines are central to delivering quality at the pace DevOps demands.
1. Allocate Proper Testing Budgets and Continuously Upgrade Testing Skills
Testing is frequently underfunded relative to development, and that imbalance compounds as release frequency increases. DevOps leaders treat test engineering as a first-class investment—both in tooling and in people. This means budgeting for test infrastructure, allocating time for engineers to learn modern testing frameworks, and recognizing that test automation is skilled engineering work, not a checkbox activity.
2. Implement Continuous Testing to Support Continuous Delivery
Continuous testing means integrating automated tests at every stage of the pipeline—not just at the end before a release gate. When tests run continuously alongside development, teams get immediate feedback on regressions, integration failures, and performance degradation. This is what allows continuous delivery to be a reality rather than a goal. Without continuous testing, a CD pipeline is simply a fast path to production incidents.
3. Embed Testers Within Integrated Delivery Teams
The traditional model of a separate QA team that receives a build at the end of a sprint is incompatible with DevOps cadences. Effective DevOps leaders embed testers—or engineers with strong testing skills—directly into cross-functional delivery teams. When testers participate in sprint planning, story grooming, and design discussions, quality considerations surface early, before they become expensive defects.
4. Automate End-to-End Functional Testing
Unit and integration tests catch many problems, but they do not validate that a complete user journey works as intended. End-to-end functional tests simulate real user interactions across multiple services and interfaces, exposing issues that lower-level tests miss. Automating these tests—and running them as part of the pipeline—ensures that deployment velocity does not come at the cost of user-facing reliability.
5. Shift Testing Left in the Development Lifecycle
“Shift left” means moving testing activities earlier in the development process—ideally beginning at the requirements and design phase. When teams write testable requirements, define acceptance criteria before coding begins, and run tests in development environments rather than waiting for staging, defects are found when they are cheapest to fix. Shift-left testing also changes the culture: quality becomes everyone’s responsibility, not something that happens after the fact.
Understanding Business Risk Is Non-Negotiable
The Forrester research emphasized that successful DevOps leaders understand the business risks associated with both DevOps and Agile adoption. Accelerated delivery pipelines introduce new failure modes—automated deployments can propagate bad code to production faster than any manual process could. Leaders who understand this risk landscape can design appropriate quality gates, rollback strategies, feature flags, and monitoring approaches that mitigate exposure without strangling delivery speed.
Every automated software delivery carries the potential for a negative user experience. The difference between organizations that manage this risk and those that are caught off guard is usually the maturity of their testing practice and the business awareness of their technical leaders.
Expanding Your Skillset as a DevOps Practitioner
Beyond implementing these five practices, DevOps leaders should actively work to broaden their skills across the quality, security, and observability domains. Understanding how to instrument applications for monitoring, how to interpret production telemetry, and how to design systems that fail gracefully are all capabilities that distinguish effective DevOps leaders from those who simply manage pipelines. The goal is not just faster software—it is better software, delivered sustainably.