Software or not, Agile remains central to efficiency in planning, delivery and evaluation. Agree? However, there is more to just the chaos that Agile solves. When matched with Quality Assurance, Agile can do wonders in terms of boosting the  Staying updated with technological advancement and processes is imperative for the companies that are thriving to stay on top of digital paradigms.

This magnanimous process also brings along, though, the need for robust testing – to ensure higher performance. Besides the quality, Agile Testing also helps cut down significantly on the development cost and time to market.

How Agile Testing Works

Agile Testing is an all-inclusive approach to testing. It unites the values and principles of the Agile manifesto to speed up testing and ensure the participation of both testers and developers in the process of creating quality software.

According to the World Quality Report, 2020-2022- Five out of ten respondents say they perform tests as early as possible in Agile and DevOps development in an attempt to speed up and optimize testing.

Though Agile testing is an imperative part of the software development process, as said above. But how? The 4 relevant quadrants of Agile Testing provide a holistic approach to QA software testing making it an imperative part of the process.

Quadrant 1: This is carried out on an ongoing basis throughout your application’s development, providing feedback on the quality of the code based on a repeated and automated process.

Quadrant 2: An approach that blends manual and automated tests and is heavily customer-focused. This quad includes functional tests to ensure that the product works as intended.

Quadrant 3: In this quad, the User Acceptance Level includes both the manual testing conducted by top engineers and the end-user testing. Hence, there’s an emphasis on getting feedback and strengthening quality.

Quadrant 4: Load testing and data security testing are part of the System or Operational Acceptance Level. It is a technology-facing performance test.

Needless to say, tests are often treated as an addendum that is implemented at the end of the development process, but reaching here brings a lot of challenges like schedule & cost overruns, hindered developer and tester communication, and overlooked functionalities. But these challenges can be mitigated with Agile testing bringing transparency in the process and addressing the point of changes.

The Clear Advantages

To build a roadmap and satisfy customers’ needs, the smooth interaction between testers and developers is vital. Testers are part of the development team and can report on the quality issues whereas the developers build unit test cases to enhance the testing process. Developers follow the recommendations of testers for the code improvements.

Agile Testing Follows Principles

Agile teams continuously perform testing to ensure that the product keeps progressing. This regular testing ensures unhindered progress with development.

  1. Testers must provide continuous feedback to the quality assurance members during the testing process.
  2. The entire team of developers, testers, and analysts test the software giving their viewpoints individually.
  3. Business team participation in each iteration enables ongoing feedback to be given on development work more rapidly.
  4. Then software quality is achieved by testing the code ensuring, detecting, and resolving issues and vulnerabilities in the development process- this can be accomplished only with regular testing.
  5. Rather than comprehensive, document-based requirements and instructions, agile development places more emphasis on customer needs checking the documentation.
  6. Traditional testing methods evaluate products after they have been implemented, whereas test-driven methods evaluate them during implementation.
  7. Then customer satisfaction is achieved with the exposure to the product during development so that with the moving project they can adjust and update requirements.
  8. Only necessary tests should be performed by testers. The goal should be to create the easiest product that contains the most value.
  9. A stagnant tester can never follow agile methods. Individuals with self-organization skills actively identify potential issues and come up with solutions with others.

But achieving the quality, it is important to master the challenges of Agile testing, let’s know some.

  • Changing requirements is not mandatory to happen every time, but it is sometimes required during a sprint. In this work done half or whatever percentage will either be destroyed or modified.

Master it with: To eliminate the chance of modification testers need to adapt and modify their processes. Testers should share information with the team and make the required changes when necessary.

  • It is likely that the product owners, who are responsible for developing user stories, have an idea of what will be added, but may not know the specifics. Because of this, the acceptance criteria are impossible to create.

Master it with: Testing gives the testers a complete idea of the story confirmed with the product owner. Here the complete details of the features need to be known.

  • Continuous testing is one important part of the development process where testing begins before coding or while coding occurs creating a major challenge since testers are required to begin building them before coding even begins.

Master it with: It is advisable to expand user stories in the backlog during sprint planning to make testing easier. Each story should be jointly defined by developers, testers, and product owners, and acceptance criteria should be written accordingly.

A team is surrounded with challenges, not one or two but they daily face many. Lack of technical skills, excessive regression cycles, a lack of communication, and a lack of quality measurement challenges the team faces while delivering a quality product.

Agile Testing Rules the Present and the Future

Agile Testing has come as a blessing enabling quick deliveries of software and less human efforts. It contributes to delivering high-quality software solutions. Businesses all over the Globe have embraced this outstanding methodology. It is a time saving method with better collaboration and communication between the teams. It is ruling the current world and will surely dominate the future with the end results businesses are enjoying.

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Written by Infiwave Solutions