Decoding Agile Testing

Agile testing is a collaborative, flexible, and adaptive approach in which testing is integrated across the entire lifecycle, beginning with the requirements phase. Because of the fast speed of Agile, there is rarely time to test everything, thus requirements must be prioritized, test cases must be prepared earlier, and test duplication must be avoided. Automation for Agile testing, like other DevOps processes, must be adopted and scaled whenever practicable. Adaptability is essential because features and requirements might vary dramatically from sprint to sprint. Exploratory testing can be used to swiftly dive deep into a new need or feature and assess its quality, delivering timely input to the development team. The purpose is not to provide documentation, but to write code that works. Because of this adaptability, an Agile testing team need broader, cross-functional skill sets than a standard manual tester. Testing must be collaborative, with regular and fluid communication, with developers and testers working together to establish how the testing strategy will go.

How can Agile Testing save IT enterprises from testing inefficiencies?

Agile techniques can significantly improve IT value delivery by transforming IT-business partnerships. However, value can only be provided when the broader IT management teams create a culture that promotes agile success. For efficient operations, every organisation, large, medium, and small, requires IT assistance and the seamless integration of new functions. The larger the enterprise, the greater the challenges and issues at hand. One of the most difficult challenges is balancing People-Process-Technology. Agile implementation in large organisations is more difficult than in small organisations.

Key steps to avoid testing inefficiencies:

1) Primary Goal of Agile Testing

Technical excellence indicates that your total IT system is reliable, efficient in terms of performance, accessible, usable, and secure. Meeting technological excellence leads to the accumulation of technical debt, which is the difference between what is expected or wanted and what exists or is being developed right now.

Any organisation considering agile to reduce technical debt must contemplate ruthless process realignment and establish the goal of embracing a new software development culture. Agile Methodology aids in refactoring and the elimination of technical debt by bringing businesses closer to their desired goal.

2) External Collaboration to Meet Agile Development Demands

To outsource application development and use domain expertise, large IT organisations cooperate with and seamlessly collaborate with specialist service providers. While it has served them well, there is a continuing need to evaluate the mutually agreed-upon criteria and corporate objectives.  Outsourcing Agile implementation for software development makes sense since an expert will put the proper formats in place and drive the process for you.

3) The Effects of Agile Transformation

Agile methodologies are adopted to support Continuous Delivery. To constantly streamline new and modified software in the development environment, business managers and users, team members, leads, and delivery teams communicate regularly.

This demands ongoing coordination and collaboration among the teams, mandating company governance and relationship management. This fosters collaborative functioning across teams despite geographical distance and is critically necessary while working on projects in the digital ecosystem.

4) Communication

The tester and developer are on the same team and cooperate throughout the process. This necessitates a great deal of communication and cooperation. As a result, if a comprehensive report for a bug is necessary, it may be accessible promptly and without any process concerns. It is essential to manage regular interaction and coordination between business, tester and development teams.

Furthermore, regular scrum sessions allow teams to detect and address bugs quickly. This results in significant time-cost-effort reductions, which is one of the primary reasons why organisations are migrating to Agile testing.

Our Take

While working on Agile methodology, one of our global customers, a global pharmaceutical corporation faced the increasingly challenging issue of rising testing costs. This was prevalent across multiple groups involved in the testing process. The real challenge was the time consumption with test cases creation and maintenance activities that added to the complexity of the test design within their Agile cycles.

To know how they overcame this problem refer to: https://www.conformiq.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Pharma-Case-study.pdf