Simply put, no it hasn't. It might be changing some development shops, but not all, and even where it is changing it isn't killing anything. Or at least, it shouldn't be.
First, let's be sure to clarify the difference between QA and testing. I went over this five years ago, but I'll summarize here. Testing is being a professional user that does some crazy and some not so crazy scenarios. Quality Assurance is the broader goal of "Is the customer happy?" They're often confused because testing is so critical to a customer being happy.
With that out of the way, it's obvious that QA as a department isn't going anywhere. It will still analyze metrics and feedback to make the app better. It will still explore the app to find defects and get them back to development to be prioritized and resolved. If a company is killing its QA department because they've discovered the latest definition of DevOps (of which there are many) there won't be a company there for long.
The question now is Does manual testing remain a quality gate to production? And it's very possible the answer is no for some places. Some fast paced environments are going to look at the risk to reward and say look, we can push to prod without a battery of tests because the benefit of getting new features out immediately is critical. I've had clients in the high-frequency trading sector that were doing this in 2010 because they have to constantly adapt their algorithms to TODAY'S market conditions. By the time QA can test, those conditions are gone and the money is gobbled up.
So this is nothing new - it's just that other companies are willing to make those jumps to production too now. Nothing is getting killed. You still need testers to explore the app. They just might not stand in the way before going live. Because you can push a new build out almost instantly, some companies will choose to send it live now while testers go to town on the build. If there's a problem, development will fix it and send out a new version.
But for the vast majority of companies, this level of reaction time is not necessary and will not be profitable. Plenty of apps can go weeks or months between release, so it's no big deal to just have everything tested. So while this author is telling all the testers to start changing careers, I would tell them to exercise caution. Learn all you can about DevOps, and all the other paradigms that are gaining traction, and find out how to best support your firm with that knowledge. And keep doing the awesome things you're doing every day.
Trust me, no skies are falling.
