What are the various phases of an Agile Testing Life Cycle?

 

The agile testing lifecycle comprises the planning of a sprint, designing a test case framework, conducting actual testing, ensuring product stability, and executing regression testing.

The digital landscape of today has given enterprises the tools, technologies, and methodologies to achieve a slew of objectives. These include improving the quality of software applications according to the market demand, accelerating the time to market, taking quick decisions in real-time, and becoming competitive. Agile has been one such methodology that has enabled enterprises to streamline their development, testing, and deployment processes based on the ever-changing demands of the end customers. Its structured approach balancing quality and speed can deliver value to the enterprises and their customers.

The high point of Agile way of development and delivery is increased collaboration between processes. Here, development and testing are not mutually exclusive and siloed processes but part of a continuum called sprint. The agile testing approach allows development and testing to be conducted simultaneously and throughout the SDLC. Further, the testers are involved in gathering requirements thereby facilitating the creation of test cases. Agile testing also involves the running of regression tests whenever a new feature is integrated into the software application. Using the agile model of development-testing-deployment, the QA team bakes in code quality and achieves robust business outcomes.

What is agile testing all about?

To overcome the inadequacies of traditional ‘waterfall’ testing methodology, the cross-functional agile quality assurance process integrates testing into the development phase. As testing is conducted incrementally (and iteratively) and in real-time, both development and QA are able to communicate and exchange information about the hidden glitches in the code to get them fixed.

In agile test management, a sprint is created to conduct specific development and testing related activities to be reviewed later. The sprint begins with a meeting where the development and testing teams realistically finalize the tasks to be accomplished. Thereafter, daily meetings are held to discuss the progress of testing and solutions are arrived at post brainstorming to sort out any challenges.

Agile testing strategy – advantages

The benefits of following an agile testing strategy include

• The requirements and modalities of testing are discussed collaboratively as a team. This offers team members with better insights into the business and technical aspects of testing enabling better alignment.
• Each testing requirement is defined based on a metric, which is measurable. This allows the QA specialists to understand whether the task has been completed.
• Test estimates are not overlooked as the QA specialists participate in the planning phase within a sprint.
• Regression testing is executed by leveraging test automation.
• The overall quality of code becomes the responsibility of the whole team (development and QA) rather than that of QA alone. At the beginning of development (and simultaneous testing,) the whole team agrees to the test strategies, prioritization of tests, and test cases.

Decoding the lifecycle of agile testing services

Following is the workflow of agile quality assurance involving both developers and testers.

Planning of a sprint: A sprint constitutes the total time given to the team to complete a user story. Here, development and testing are divided into small iterative and incremental processes. At the beginning, the project owner, developers, and QA specialists discuss the objectives to be achieved and activities to be performed within the sprint. It also includes the daily stand-ups to plan the course of the day.

Designing a test case: While the developers build user stories, the QA specialists design the test cases. The latter include various tests, parameters, and metrics to be conducted/monitored. The initial design of a test case determines how the subsequent test cases would be. The same is then shared with the development team for review. Thereafter, both the teams decide on the test cases to be automated.

Actual testing: In an agile environment, the testing team tests the user stories that are created by the development team. By working in tandem, the teams are able to detect (and fix) glitches early in the product lifecycle. The automated test cases are executed across the development cycle and the defects are fixed therein.

Product stability: The best part of working in an agile environment is the ability to add new features to the product at any stage without making it complex. The agile testing team ensures product stability after determining the requirement flow.

Regression testing: Post addition of a new user story to the development process, both manual and automated test cases are run to understand the impact of the new user story on the functioning of the product.

Conclusion

Agile testing breaks the barriers between development and testing processes and helps to eliminate glitches from the software code early. It is certainly capable of addressing the myriad challenges of the modern software development process compared to the traditional waterfall model. 

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How to implement Test Automation in an Agile set-up?

The digital landscape has witnessed frequent changes in the way software products are developed, devices introduced, technologies used, costs optimized, processes streamlined, and customer expectations are fulfilled. One of the changes is related to the way a software product is developed. As opposed to the traditional method of SDLC where development and testing take place one after the other, Agile has gone a step further. In an Agile testing strategy, development and testing are done concurrently in short sprints.

                 

The advent of Agile methodology in the development of software has brought about significant changes. The changes are primarily about improving the quality of software and hastening its delivery schedule. The thrust of Agile is towards improving as well as shortening the sprint iteration leading to better outcomes. In the Agile testing environment, the imperative of testing a product feature or functionality post its development in the quickest possible way has underlined the importance of test automation.

Test automation services bring the following benefits

• Glitches or bugs can significantly reduce the quality of software by impairing its functionality, usability, and security. If the bugs are detected at a later stage, the cost and time of removing them can be significantly high. However, Agile testing can identify and eliminate glitches in the initial phases of the SDLC. This apart from improving the quality and timeliness of software delivery, can enhance the ROI as well.

• Easy and quick adaption to changes put forward by the client. Since the changes are done in quick iterations but in an incremental way, they can be easily incorporated. In the changing market dynamics, such a development process is the most suited one as it squarely addresses the client and market requirement(s) as and when needed.

• Enhances the test coverage area, which otherwise gets severely curtailed during manual testing. Moreover, automated tests can be conducted without manual intervention at any time of the day (or night.)

• Optimizes the testing of resources by engaging a small number of test automation experts. This is not possible in manual testing for conducting a large number of tests needs a greater number of testers.

• Easy to develop the beta version and receive customer feedback. Based on the feedback, the software can be suitably customized to meet the client or market requirement.

How to effectively implement test automation in an Agile set up?

Selecting the right automation framework: Not all tests are to be automated, for writing scripts for them can be a time consuming exercise. The test automation experts should earmark specific tests for automation and select an appropriate framework. The criteria for choosing a framework should be based on its scalability, clear understanding and easy adaptability. There can be a number of automation frameworks as given below:

Data driven:  This framework is used when specific functionalities of a software application are tested for different sets of data. In this, the data are stored in external databases such as Excel or XML files.

Keyword driven: This framework allows the testing of data based on certain keywords. The keywords present in the database perform specific functions on the application, which are tested for their effectiveness.

Modular based: Here, the test code is broken into independent modules that are connected logically to each other. The framework considers each module as a separate test case, which upon completion, ensures the entire software functions according to the stated objectives.

Hybrid: As the name suggests, this framework leverages the benefits of one or more frameworks as mentioned above.

Setting the sprint target: The target for each and every sprint should be identified and fixed. The target should not be influenced by the level of complexity of the effort involved. However, notwithstanding the difficulties one can face while working on the sprint, the end result leads to a better testing outcome.

 

Team feedback: Timely feedback from the team can help test experts to identify features or modules that can be automated successfully. It is a good practice to involve each and every member of the testing team in deciding the features to automate. The expert should discuss the approach taken for automation with other team members. Continuous feedback can help members to suggest new features and approaches to be adopted for automation.

Conclusion

The above mentioned points can pave the way for an effective implementation of automation in the testing of software. These can help the team to achieve test objectives that are made part of an Agile set up.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, Effectively implementing Test Automation in the Agile set-up.