The tech landscape is oversaturated today and the key player is automation testing, so beating the competition can seem impossible. A product’s quality has become a key differentiator in a world where customer satisfaction must be consistent. The rapid pace of the tech market becomes impossible if you cannot deliver quality at speed. Thus, the most successful organizations are those that are able to achieve quality at a rapid pace.
Consequently, how do you maintain a high-quality product while speeding up your release cycles?
The traditional methodologies used by organizations to achieve quality are waterfall, scrum, and kanban. Although these techniques may help reduce time to market, they can be challenging to use. It is because they are often rigid and development and testing are siloed, so little collaboration is possible at the same time.
An Overview Of Agile History
A shift in technology occurred in the late 1970s with the introduction of personal computers. Customer requirements were changing rapidly, so you had to keep up. Your software solutions and delivery cannot be based on a traditional software development approach, such as Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
During the early 1990s, a small number of software industry leaders developed and promoted new approaches to meet changing requirements. New and advanced methodologies were introduced in 2001 by a small group of industry leaders. During this period, Agile software development was coined for the first time. An Agile manifesto was created that describes the values of Agile.
How does an Agile Testing Framework work?
Embracing constant change is at the core of agile. With Agile Methodology, software products are constantly subject to changing requirements, technical stacks, timelines and deliverables.
Agile methodologies require regular iterations (called sprints) of software being built and developed. To ensure that quality issues are identified and resolved quickly, these small iterations of the product should also be tested. Tests of these small iterations of the product can be conducted with an Agile Testing Framework by enabling testing of these micro-iterations.
Agile Testing Frameworks: What makes them good?
In order to be effective, Agile Testing Frameworks should be able to cover a product’s breadth and depth. For a successful Agile Testing Framework, the following features are crucial:
Vocabulary used commonly
There must be a shared vocabulary between the organization and technical teams for terms and concepts related to the product, even if some new words are created. Communicating among different teams, even within a team, is easier with a common vocabulary.
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For different teams, different tests need to be administered
The product should be tested in different ways by different teams. It is and should be different how teams in an organization test a product than how technical teams do. Users can better judge whether a product will be accepted by users when organizational teams are familiar with the user scenarios. Similarly, technical teams are better able to test code quality through unit tests because they have a better understanding of the implementation details.
Test-driven development
Even before the behavior is implemented, having a test case that defines the expected behavior is helpful for clarifying the understanding. The implementation details are not a source of bias for you; you know exactly what needs to be implemented. Failure of the test indicates that the behavior isn’t correct. You know you’re on the right track once the test passes. Precision plays a very important role here.
To ensure correct implementation of the behavior, it is crucial to identify what all should be verified in the test. Meanwhile, the test should be easy to maintain, loosely coupled with the system, and finite in scope so that it doesn’t cover everything or nothing at all.
1. Experts in the domain
Having domain experts on the team, as needed, is a good idea. An expert in a particular domain, such as an expert or a security expert, can provide the product with a different perspective. The technical team is not good with the business domain, just as experts aren’t good at technical details. By regularly reviewing product deliverables, experts bring in crucial feedback that might otherwise be hard to incorporate towards the end of the product development process.
It is also more likely that industry experts will take product iterations to customers and gather feedback for further development. In a similar manner, security experts on the team can help close security loopholes early in the development process. From the very beginning, security must be considered. It is important to follow security guidelines when designing the product to avoid flaws that could prove fatal later on.
2. Tests Organization
Organizing your test cases in a trackable manner becomes crucial when dealing with a large number of test cases that span multiple teams and domains. This is where Agile Testing Matrix can help, not only by providing a framework for arranging test cases, but also as a guide to understanding the purpose and objective of each test case.
This matrix can be filled in when you categorize your test cases into unit tests, functional tests, acceptance tests, security tests, etc. As you test your product, you become more aware of what each test case is doing and how strongly it covers the quality of the product.
You can also use this matrix to determine which areas of the product receive the least focus from a quality perspective, which can help you direct your testing efforts accordingly.
3. Extreme exploratory testing
Testing is less about a job and more about a mindset. You start getting influenced by the knowledge you have of a product as you become familiar with it. As a result, you don’t try to use the product differently once you start making assumptions about how it should be used. Therefore, a different user’s perspective is not possible to test the product.
Those who are novices may use the product differently than those who are fond of pushing the product to extremes. The product may behave differently depending on the level or background of its users. It is possible to uncover issues with products by performing these extreme role-plays during testing.
4. Sprint demos
Technical and organizational teams should regularly demonstrate small iterations of the product built every sprint to check if expectations match reality. As a result, any difference in expectations and deliverables can be detected and corrected in a timely manner. As well as building confidence in what teams are building, sprint demos help them to show what they are working on. Once you start seeing some essential pieces of the structure, it becomes easier to see the overall picture. It is possible to accomplish this through sprint demos.
5. User-facing documentation
The truth is, user-facing documentation plays an essential role in user experience, even if technical teams may not want to assume responsibility for it. For users with questions or doubts, documentation is a good place to start. You can often see the missing pieces and problems in documentation when you write and/or review it from the perspective of a user who is not familiar with the internal details of the product.
The more you explain something to someone else, the more you understand what should happen, why it should happen, and where it should happen. By doing this, we would get the ability to identify different sets of issues with the product, which can then be classified as bugs or enhancements to the product
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Agile methodologies facilitate the development of products more quickly, but a velocity without quality is meaningless. Keeping quality in mind is of utmost importance. It is quite imperative for every member of the team to be concerned about quality in order to achieve velocity with quality. Every team member should wear a testing hat during design discussions or during the actual development of the product. It is everyone’s responsibility to ensure quality. A product should serve quality.
Test Automation in Agile vs. Waterfall
Compared to traditional methods like Waterfall, the Agile manifesto emphasizes interactions and iterations. According to the International Software Testing Qualifications Board, Agile projects include:
The feedback is quicker and more accurate.
Integrating continuously is crucial. The software is now accessible to stakeholders at any stage, in contrast to traditional sequential development processes. Both sides can steer clear of any false expectations by discussing and clarifying features and requirements.
Having a people-centered culture.
The collaboration between representatives of the organization, QA engineers, and developers needs to be streamlined instead of being dependent on tools. Team dynamics are certainly determinant to the success of a project with the distinct and imperative skill sets that each position has, whether it is developing product features or determining testing strategies.
Project management and development that are efficient.
In order to optimize workflows, Agile teams often follow management frameworks like Scrum and Kanban, or Extreme Programming (XP). There are a variety of methods and instruments for dealing with large chunks of work to manageable amounts, such as iteration-divided projects, task symbols, and work-in-progress tickets.
Testing and development activities are integrated with software delivery.
The idea of short iteration sequences must be adhered to by teams in order to keep testing and development going in parallel. In a simplified process, testing will take on a shared responsibility after the role has been changed to shared responsibility:
- QA engineers, developers, and stakeholders of the organization collaborated on the development of user stories
- Development of features based on user stories is accompanied by unit and integration tests created and run by developers
- In addition to scripting and running acceptance tests based on Acceptance Criteria (AC), QA engineers conduct end-to-end tests to ensure that the software works as designed.
- Developers receive feedback on completed features from stakeholders using pre-written acceptance test scripts.
Agile Testing Best Practices
Testing Agile software can be challenging if it is not performed in accordance with some Agile testing best practices. Agile development encompasses all aspects of the software life cycle, not just programming. There are several fundamental differences between Agile testing and other testing methods.
Organizers decide which activities fall within which phases of agile testing based on their purpose and timeframe. During the testing process, new Agile testers must be aware of these phases and activities. Follow the following best practices to avoid Agile testing challenges:
Testing repetitively
For every new feature or bug fix, you’ll inevitably need to repeat some of your tests. For every type of build, branch, and environment, the same test case may need to be run. It is a sign of bad design when a test case has many variations.
Code austerity must be maintained
In order to produce high-quality software, agile software development uses a wide range of principles and techniques. By pruning away unnecessary elements, code austerity means keeping your code clean and simple.
Communicating with developers
With Agile, testing has become increasingly important. You should always ensure that your software is deployable and working as expected with frequent deployments. A well-tested and maintained code is essential for this. Agile teams must maintain clear communication between their testers and developers in order to accomplish this.
Agile requires constant communication because sprint priorities are constantly adjusted in response to changing requirements. It is crucial for testers and developers to always know what each other is working on at any given time in order to adapt quickly to these changes.
One Functionality at a Time
One functionality at a time makes it easier to determine what went wrong and why something didn’t turn out as expected. When you have already tested a particular feature, you know that it works, so you do not need to spend more time on it.
Conclusion
Software development teams are increasingly relying on Agile applications, making automation a competitive advantage. QA teams must plan their automation strategies right from the start despite the fact that the positive outcomes of automation can only be determined in the long run.
The use of agile testing in application development has become a widespread standard for delivering high-quality products. Collaboration between the different teams is therefore crucial to achieving desired results. Agile testing requirements can be implemented in real-time only with the help of a unified cross-browser testing platform.
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By testing across different supported browsers, you ensure that the performance and quality of your web application will not be affected. Due to this, LambdaTest offers a unique set of features and enhancements that have transformed the entire testing ecosystem. By utilizing the cloud infrastructure, you can perform both manual and automated testing with frameworks like Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Appium and more. There are several great features that make LambdaTest a preferred choice for organizations worldwide:
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- Analyzing the web application’s visual elements is easy.
- To ensure your application or website performs as desired, you can locally host web application testing.
- Different screen sizes can be tested without compromising the appearance of the website.
- You can test mobile apps on real devices in the cloud, as well as on mobile emulators online.
- Different locations can be tested using geolocation testing.
