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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Why Agile Testing needs to follow a new approach?

The global digital transformation journey requires the quality of processes, models, products, and services to be top-notch. To ensure accelerated growth, enterprises are embracing the Agile model and moving away from the traditional ones - waterfall, spiral, and iterative. The reason being the slowness and inadequacies of these models. Enterprises have realized the need to adopt innovative ways to offer customer delight, the final outcome to stay competitive. The agile testing approach is mainly embraced by enterprises that need their development pipeline to create continuous builds. This calls for both development and testing to be conducted simultaneously instead of the earlier silo-based waterfall method.

The need for adopting the agile testing approach has been necessitated due to the growing complexity of software applications. Today, the performance of the software is determined by the quality of its interfaces with third-party applications, browsers, devices, and operating systems. The more complex a software is, the more comprehensive testing it demands. Agile testing is about shift-left testing where planning, designing, writing, and testing code becomes part of the sprint. It is a collaborative approach instead of the waterfall’s silo-driven approach and drives better outcomes. Agile testing involves taking continual feedback from the customers and stakeholders.

Why is agile software testing advantageous?

The complexity of software applications has shifted the focus on testing. This is to ensure the applications live up to the expectations of both businesses and customers. The agile testing approach focuses on smart testing through automation rather than using the time-consuming manual means. Here, the testers and developers follow a collaborative approach with the former offering timely feedback to the latter. This makes the final product fully aligned to the customers’ requirements or expectations.

Principles of Agile Testing

Agile application testing follows a set of principles to deliver glitch-free products to the end-customers:

Continuous Testing: Agile testing experts conduct continuous testing to identify glitches at various stages of development and integration.

Continuous Feedback: One of the main reasons why products often fail to meet customers’ expectations is the apparent disconnect that exists between the end customers and other stakeholders. The agile testing strategy ensures the development team receives continuous feedback on the quality of builds. This helps the product to meet the business as well as customer needs.

Test-Driven: The agile testing approach includes testing at the time of development itself rather than later. This saves time and costs as mitigating a glitch after development can be expensive and time-consuming.

Less Documentation: The reusable checklist used by the agile testing specialists ensures the focus is on testing rather than on keeping the incidental details.

Simplified and Clean Coding: Since the glitches are identified and remedied within the sprint, the final code remains simplified and clean.

Accountability is shared by all: In the traditional system of testing, only the testing team is held responsible for the presence of glitches. However, in agile testing methodology, the development, testing, and business analyst teams share equal responsibility for the outcome.

Latest trends in Agile Testing

The spiraling demand for software testing and the advent of new technologies like IoT, AI, big data, and analytics emphasize the need to follow the latest trends. These include:

Artificial Intelligence (AI): The objective of agile in identifying and mitigating errors early on in the development cycle can be met effectively by using AI. For example, AI can analyze the database of past codes and check for patterns that contained glitches. These patterns can then be flagged for the developers and testers to gain necessary insights. Artificial intelligence can analyze the code under development to find if it deviated from its intended objective. This way it can help the agile-driven team to align the build with the business objectives and customer expectations.

Move towards Quality Engineering: The growing technological complexity of software applications means more chances for the ingress of bugs. So, along with continuous testing to identify errors in real-time, the focus should be on eliminating the ingress of errors in the first place. This calls for moving towards quality engineering where products and services are designed and built to meet or exceed customers’ expectations. It also involves the development, management, operation, and maintenance of IT systems displaying a high-quality standard.

Big Data Testing: With applications interfacing with other IT ecosystems (SMAC for example), a huge quantum of data gets generated. These need to be tested for errors using big data testing. Here, rather than testing the individual features of the software application, activities like data creation, storage, retrieval, and processing are validated.

Continuous Improvement, Integration, and Delivery: Agile is giving way to DevOps where apart from development and testing, the operations team is also involved. Here, any software build is tested continuously and enhanced based on the customers’ feedback. The entire DevOps process is geared towards ensuring the integration and delivery of glitch-free software quickly.

Conclusion

Is agile testing meeting the rising expectations of software applications? With delivering better customer experiences becoming critical for companies to stay competitive, the agile way of testing needs to follow the latest trends. Capturing and mitigating glitches earlier in the SDLC or even preempting them can significantly increase the acceptance of software in the market.

This article is originally published on medium.com.