Transforming QA in Agile Organizations

 

Digitization has brought in speed, convenience, accessibility, quality, and cost rationalization as major benefits for the customers. The traditional management practices are often unable to achieve those benefits in real-time. With a rapidly changing digital landscape and the need to address the challenges posed by shifting customer preferences and growing competition, enterprises are embracing the agile development methodology. According to the agile testing approach, quality assurance is more about ‘test fast’ rather than ‘test everything.’ Consequently, QA, in order to keep up with the pace-driven agile model of software development, needs to adapt. 

It needs to fully integrate into the build cycle from the traditional ‘find bugs at the end of the development’ approach. Agile testing entails the QA to be present in the end-to-end value chain, which means right from the ideation stage to the development and integration of code, product delivery, and beyond. The reason why many enterprises, even after adopting the agile way of development, continue with the traditional model of QA, is the absence of an agile culture.

To ensure the success of an agile testing approach, the QA team needs to unlearn some of the shibboleths. These may include the following:

·        Testing is a distinct process exclusive of development and delivery

·        Test automation is only for regression purpose

·        The ultimate goal of the QA team is to detect bugs

How to transform traditional QA into an agile testing framework?

QA forms a critical component in the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) value chain of enterprises following the agile testing methodology. And to ensure the reliability of CI/CD outcomes, QA should be embedded at every step of the build-test-delivery process. In agile-based organizations, the release management process can shift to the combined development and QA team from the operations team. This enables the QA team to view the end-to-end product delivery process thereby identifying and fixing bottlenecks (if any). Enterprises should go about transforming their QA processes by taking the following approach:

·        Increasing the level of test automation

·        Improving the testing skills of the QA team

·        Developing a strategy to incorporate AI in the agile testing methodology through analytics, RPA, and self-learning

Focus on problems to achieve better solutions: The Agile testing services should focus on the bottlenecks that prevent the integration of QA into the build cycle instead of the solution. It is only by analyzing the bottlenecks and finding a way to fix them that the QA team can deliver the final product, quickly and consistently. In doing so, the QA team can choose various agile test automation tools.

Upgrading the skillset of testers: The lack of knowledgeable agile testers is one of the reasons why enterprises shy away from implementing agile. According to the World Quality Report, around 42% of respondents cited a lack of expertise in agile testing for not implementing agile in its true form. The testers should have the programming knowledge to create test automation scripts and access the underlying business logic. They should be able to analyze the code and make improvements from the perspective of performance. Hence, before implementing test automation, upskill the QA team into the nitty-gritty of agile application testing.

Embracing test automation: One of the prominent features of implementing agile testing is automation. It helps to speed up the testing process and identifies (and fixes) glitches that are often missed during manual testing. So, not only regression testing, the QA team should focus on extending agile test automation to other test types like smoke testing. Developers should play a crucial role in enabling the QA team to set up automation or conduct exploratory testing.

Adopting RPA: Robotic Process Automation can drive high performance in the IT systems by reducing the level of end-to-end testing. It helps to automate tedious processes, reduce glitches, and remove drudge work, thereby allowing the QA team to focus more on exploratory testing or other important activities. It is more about automating the processes by using the correct functionality.

Real-time testing: Although test virtualization can mimic the test scenarios and parameters on the cloud, real-time testing is a different ballgame altogether. It allows testers to identify the functional issues, which can only be found in the real world. Real-time testing can be handy when it comes to testing during peak periods and is a valuable proposition for brands to expand their test coverage.

Conclusion

Organizations are becoming agile to stay competitive and deliver the best user experience to their users. However, traditional QA needs to adapt to the build ecosystem that agile entails. The first step in this transition is embracing a culture change where QA becomes a cumulative responsibility of both the development and testing teams.