Do you remember the class clown at your school? Maybe they wrote funny jokes on the blackboard or put the whoopee cushion on the teacher’s chair to make everyone laugh. Recent studies show that adolescent humor is often correlated with higher levels of intelligence – but not necessarily higher levels of maturity.

We may not see as many practical jokes in the business world as we did in the classroom, but we do see a lack of maturity among highly capable testing teams – especially when it comes to optimizing their processes for DevOps. That’s because many organizations fail to recognize the critical role that testing plays in a DevOps transformation initiative’s success. And just like in a classroom, this causes disruptions and brings progress to a standstill.

But when testing is prioritized as a critical piece of the DevOps transformation puzzle, then quality, speed, and efficiency through automation are soon to follow. But there’s a catch – as enterprises adopt test automation and introduce new tools and frameworks, they’ll have to manage an inevitable sprawl of testing data across tools and systems.