Test, Deploy, and Maintain Full Stack Applications
Overview
This standard defines the competencies required to assure, deploy, operate and continuously improve full stack applications throughout their lifecycle. It covers testing strategies, automated delivery pipelines, secure deployment, operational monitoring, incident management, cost control and sustainable operation in production environments.
Robust testing, deployment, and maintenance practices underpin the reliability and resilience of digital services. By embedding continuous integration and delivery, observability, and structured incident response, organisations can reduce downtime, manage risks, and ensure applications evolve to meet changing business and user needs.
This standard is intended for engineers, DevOps practitioners, and full stack developers responsible for assuring, releasing, and maintaining applications in production environments.
Performance criteria
You must be able to:
- Define and implement a comprehensive test strategy, including unit, integration, performance and accessibility testing, in line with organisational quality and assurance standards.
- Build and operate continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, incorporating quality gates, automated checks and approval controls, in line with organisational delivery and governance procedures.
- Package and deploy applications using containers and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), applying security checks and policy validation, in line with organisational deployment and security standards.
- Implement runtime security controls and patch management processes as distinct and auditable activities, in line with organisational cyber security and operational policies.
- Implement observability practices, including Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs), aligned with recognised industry reliability and assurance practices.
- Maintain operational runbooks and on-call procedures, in line with organisational support and service management standards.
- Operate incident management processes, including triage, escalation and post-incident review, and the use of approved automated support tooling, in line with organisational incident response procedures.
- Manage technical debt and dependencies, prioritising remediation and upgrades, in line with organisational risk, quality and lifecycle management practices.
- Apply documentation standards across systems, architecture and APIs, in line with organisational documentation and change control requirements.
- Monitor cost, efficiency and sustainability metrics, and propose optimisation actions, in line with organisational financial management and sustainability objectives.
Knowledge and Understanding
You need to know and understand:
- Testing strategies and test automation approaches, including coverage concepts, non-functional testing and accessibility testing.
- Principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery, including quality gates, approvals and automated assurance.
- Containerisation and Infrastructure as Code concepts, and their role in repeatable and controlled deployment.
- Deployment strategies, including phased rollout, rollback and environment promotion techniques.
- Runtime security concepts, including secure configuration, vulnerability remediation and patch management.
- Observability and reliability concepts, including logs, metrics, traces, SLIs, SLOs and their use in operational decision-making.
- Incident management practices, including detection, escalation, communication and post-incident review.
- Technical debt management concepts, including prioritisation, dependency management and lifecycle planning.
- Documentation standards and practices for systems, APIs and operational processes.
- Principles of financial operations (FinOps), efficiency and sustainable engineering, including cost awareness and resource optimisation.
- Test automation methods, tools, and data management practices for creating and maintaining reliable automated tests.
- Continuous improvement approaches, including stakeholder feedback, analytics, and audit findings, and their integration into development and operational practices.
Scope/range
Scope Performance
Scope Knowledge
Values
Behaviours
Skills
Glossary
Test strategy
A structured approach to planning and executing testing activities to provide confidence that software meets defined quality and assurance requirements.
Accessibility testing
Testing conducted to verify that applications are usable by people with disabilities, in line with recognised accessibility standards.
Continuous integration (CI)
The practice of automatically building and testing code changes when they are committed to a shared repository.
Continuous delivery (CD)
The practice of automating the preparation and release of software so it can be deployed reliably and repeatedly.
Quality gate
A defined checkpoint in a delivery pipeline that software must pass before progressing to the next stage.
Containerisation
The packaging of applications and their dependencies into isolated, portable runtime units.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
The management of infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files rather than manual processes.
Runtime security
Security controls applied to applications while they are running, including configuration, monitoring and vulnerability management.
Patch management
The process of applying updates to software and infrastructure to address security vulnerabilities and defects.
Observability
The ability to understand the internal state of a system through logs, metrics, traces and health indicators.
Service Level Indicator (SLI)
A quantitative measure of system behaviour, such as availability, latency or error rate.
Service Level Objective (SLO)
A target value or range for a Service Level Indicator that defines acceptable system performance.
Operational runbook
Documentation that describes how to operate, monitor and respond to issues in a live system.
On-call procedure
An organised process for providing support outside normal working hours.
Incident management
The coordinated process for detecting, responding to and resolving service disruptions.
Technical debt
The accumulation of design or implementation choices that may require rework to maintain quality or adaptability.
FinOps
A set of practices that support effective financial management of cloud and digital technology resources.
Sustainable engineering
The practice of designing and operating systems to minimise environmental impact while maintaining performance and reliability.