#agile testing experts

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How Agile and Test Automation depend on each other?

To meet the stringent quality requirements of complex applications, the Software Development Life Cycle has changed. If earlier, the waterfall was the preferred model with testing done at the end of development, it has given way to Agile today. This is because the waterfall model suffered from a lot of inconsistencies and did not deliver the right results. Also, it increased the cost of software development and testing for businesses. The need for Agile was felt due to the growing complexity of software applications. As the new software applications come with endpoints that interface with third-party databases, servers, or sites, the quantum of vulnerabilities has increased. If not plugged in time, once these applications are out in the market, they can be exploited by hackers leading to severe consequences for the users.

With Agile, it has become easy to detect glitches and vulnerabilities early on in the software development pipeline. Also, to keep pace with shorter release cycles, enterprises are adopting Agile test automation. This is to ensure the software conforms to the exacting standards of quality. Further, with plenty of features being added to the software in every sprint, developers need to ensure they do not affect the existing functionalities. Also, as the sprint is of a shorter duration, it is not possible to test and execute the entire software suite every time a feature is added. This is where Agile test automation can help by running the codes iteratively.

 Why Agile development needs automation?

The Agile model entails the development, testing, and delivery of glitch-free software products within fast turnarounds. Since the process can involve repeated changes, a robust test automation strategy should be put in place. For Agile testers, there are several challenges to be addressed with Agile test automation.

 Challenges for Agile testing

Even though adopting an Agile testing framework delivers a string of positive outcomes, it can entail some challenges too. These include

Inadequate test coverage: During the later sprints when a number of features are added to the build, the testers get lesser time to test them and analyze their impact. In such conditions, a few user stories are left untested with the hope that they would not affect the release. However, by automating the Agile application testing process, the build can be put through a regression testing exercise to achieve assured quality.

Frequent build leading to cracked code: In Agile, there can be instances of frequent code changes due to the addition of features to the build. These changes can lead to cracked codes, especially during the integration phase. Further, to implement a continuous integration and deployment pipeline (CI/CD), the Agile testing experts ought to implement test automation.

Performance issues: It can often be the case when improving the functionality of an app can end up complicating it further. Since every change can lead to an increase in the volume of codes, the performance of the app can take a hit. However, conducting Agile performance testing using automation tools can identify the performance issues.

Compatibility issues: Any software of the day should be checked for its compatibility across devices, operating platforms, browsers, and networks. Ideally, testers should ensure the seamless run of software across devices. An automated test run can check for glitches or vulnerabilities in the endpoints and APIs, and make sure the compatibility issues are sorted.

API testing: A web or mobile app involves the implementation of complex APIs, the quality of which is often overlooked. Automation testing tools such as LambdaTest can help Agile testers to overcome such issues.

Things to automate in Agile

When it comes to introducing automation in testing, areas like regression testing or smoke testing take the cake. However, these are just the top layers of the build, which can be insufficient as far as ensuring the quality of the software is concerned. The other areas where test automation can be implemented are

Builds and deployments

Unit tests

Non-functional testing

API testing

GUI testing

Repetitive tasks like data comparisons

Benefits of test automation

Agile development can be benefited from automated testing in a number of ways related to performance, portability, versioning, reliability, usability, and speed, among others. The benefits include

Enhanced quality

Quick turnaround

Repeat execution

Seamless performance

Better collaboration

Conclusion

The Agile testing approach

can lead enterprises to create a better software development pipeline. Its success is underpinned on the level of implementing test automation. The automation-led Agile methodology combined with DevOps has the potential to improve the quality of software and deliver great user experiences.

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What are the latest trends in Agile Testing?

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.

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How can Enterprise Applications deliver value through Agile Testing in 2019

In today’s rapidly growing data driven world of business, enterprises need to step up their game by leveraging cutting edge applications, technologies and systems. To stay a step ahead of the competition, enterprises should be able to tackle challenges and meet emerging customer needs. The challenges could be in the form of new security scares, implementation of new technologies/paradigms, or the changing dynamics of user preferences. To meet these challenges, enterprises should be agile, efficient, scalable, flexible, and innovative by leveraging enterprise applications. However, before we delve into how agile testing can add value to enterprise applications in the year 2019, let us understand what these are all about.

What are enterprise applications?

These applications cater to the needs of enterprises in terms of augmenting productivity, cutting down redundancies, enhancing efficiency, and bolstering the customer feedback mechanism among others. These complex and mission critical applications are distributed and component based that can be scaled up (or down) based on the business requirements. The five characteristics of enterprise applications are:

Scalable to meet the expected growth in users.

Flexible to support new features, functionalities or modules.

Robust enough to function seamlessly without glitches.

Built-in security features to thwart the ingress of any     malware. Moreover, the security should be reviewed on a continuous basis     throughout the application lifecycle.

In order to ensure the above characteristics hold good and the applications meet their stated business objectives, these should undergo rigorous agile testing. So, why should testers forsake the traditional waterfall model of testing and opt for agile software testing?

Shortcomings of traditional waterfall testing

The modus operandi of building an enterprise application or any application for that matter is ideation and designing followed by development, integration, testing, deployment and maintenance. Since the process is sequential where each stage does not begin working until the previous stage has given a sign off, QA testers are able to test the components quite late in the SDLC. Thus, any glitch found becomes difficult, time consuming, and costly to be removed.

Moreover, there is little interaction between the testers and developers as both work in their respective silos and don’t want to venture into each other’s territory. Often testers wait for their turn to run a set of pre-determined tests to decide if the software needs to be passed ahead or sent back. Since the testing is not comprehensive and often lacks precision, the software is not fully quality compliant. As a result, customers must bear the brunt of operating a glitch prone application and the business reaping the bitter harvest of losing customers. To address these challenges, agile testing is increasingly being used by the QA team.

What is an agile testing approach?

The agile testing approach has shorter iterations and is better placed to identify errors and correcting them. In fact, at the beginning of the designing phase, the development and testing teams are placed in ‘sprints’ meant to achieve a particular objective. In the fast-changing dynamics of business today where enterprise applications function as the eyes and ears of stakeholders, it is only the agile testing services that can add value and deliver quality.

Advantages of using agile testing services

Fulfils the objectives of digital transformation initiatives: Digital transformation envisages the implementation of digital technologies to boost productivity, reduce turnarounds, enhance efficiency, augment capacities, and quicken the customer response mechanism. The agile testing services help to achieve these goals by allowing updation, maintenance, and testing of applications in real time. These help enterprises to deliver value and an enhanced experience to the users.

Aids continuous testing: Since the enterprise applications are run across platforms, devices, and networks, they should be tested continuously. This ensures the identification and mitigation of glitches or/and compliance and regulatory issues swiftly. The agile testing experts carry out necessary changes in the applications based on customer feedback on a continuous basis.

Swift turnarounds: Since glitches are identified and mitigated in real time and the development and testing teams are in constant communication, the development, integration, and delivery of software occur fast. Furthermore, there is little wastage of time when it comes to understanding the requirements and executing the specific activity in pursuance of testing.

Better communication: In the agile software testing process, the development and testing teams work in sprints. The moment the code of a module is written, it is passed on to the testing team within the sprint. If any glitch is found the same is removed and the code is passed on to the next sprint. Here, there is a greater cohesion between the teams leading to transparency, collaboration, and sharing of responsibilities. In fact, code development becomes a joint responsibility.

Facilitate and incorporate continuous feedback: The agile testing experts, besides testing the application continuously, facilitate the receipt and analysis of feedback from the end users. The feedback is taken into consideration to develop a quality compliant product.

Role of automation: One of the shortcomings of the waterfall model of testing is its overdependence on manual testing. This often leads testers to shun repetitive processes thereby missing out on testing many features and functionalities of the applications. The agile model of development and testing incorporates automation to validate the codes. It helps in executing tests such as performance, regression, usability etc. Also, by generating any number of virtual users, testers can validate features (and functionalities) across geographies, devices, platforms, and networks.

Conclusion

The agile testing strategy streamlines the development, testing and delivery of applications. Since the robust functioning of enterprise applications depends on myriad digital touchpoints and APIs, they should be validated for quality. Agile enhances the testing methodology and ensures glitches are identified and removed at the earliest.

Check out this Agile Testing White Paper to explore how Agile Software Testing metrics helps organizations deliver better software in a timely manner.

[diyatestingupdates-blog]

How can Enterprise Applications deliver value through Agile Testing in 2019

In today’s rapidly growing data driven world of business, enterprises need to step up their game by leveraging cutting edge applications, technologies and systems. To stay a step ahead of the competition, enterprises should be able to tackle challenges and meet emerging customer needs. The challenges could be in the form of new security scares, implementation of new technologies/paradigms, or the changing dynamics of user preferences. To meet these challenges, enterprises should be agile, efficient, scalable, flexible, and innovative by leveraging enterprise applications. However, before we delve into how agile testing can add value to enterprise applications in the year 2019, let us understand what these are all about.

What are enterprise applications?

These applications cater to the needs of enterprises in terms of augmenting productivity, cutting down redundancies, enhancing efficiency, and bolstering the customer feedback mechanism among others. These complex and mission critical applications are distributed and component based that can be scaled up (or down) based on the business requirements. The five characteristics of enterprise applications are:

Scalable to meet the expected growth in users.

Flexible to support new features, functionalities or modules.

Robust enough to function seamlessly without glitches.

Built-in security features to thwart the ingress of any     malware. Moreover, the security should be reviewed on a continuous basis     throughout the application lifecycle.

In order to ensure the above characteristics hold good and the applications meet their stated business objectives, these should undergo rigorous agile testing. So, why should testers forsake the traditional waterfall model of testing and opt for agile software testing?

Shortcomings of traditional waterfall testing

The modus operandi of building an enterprise application or any application for that matter is ideation and designing followed by development, integration, testing, deployment and maintenance. Since the process is sequential where each stage does not begin working until the previous stage has given a sign off, QA testers are able to test the components quite late in the SDLC. Thus, any glitch found becomes difficult, time consuming, and costly to be removed.

Moreover, there is little interaction between the testers and developers as both work in their respective silos and don’t want to venture into each other’s territory. Often testers wait for their turn to run a set of pre-determined tests to decide if the software needs to be passed ahead or sent back. Since the testing is not comprehensive and often lacks precision, the software is not fully quality compliant. As a result, customers must bear the brunt of operating a glitch prone application and the business reaping the bitter harvest of losing customers. To address these challenges, agile testing is increasingly being used by the QA team.

What is an agile testing approach?

The agile testing approach has shorter iterations and is better placed to identify errors and correcting them. In fact, at the beginning of the designing phase, the development and testing teams are placed in ‘sprints’ meant to achieve a particular objective. In the fast-changing dynamics of business today where enterprise applications function as the eyes and ears of stakeholders, it is only the agile testing services that can add value and deliver quality.

Advantages of using agile testing services

Fulfils the objectives of digital transformation initiatives: Digital transformation envisages the implementation of digital technologies to boost productivity, reduce turnarounds, enhance efficiency, augment capacities, and quicken the customer response mechanism. The agile testing services help to achieve these goals by allowing updation, maintenance, and testing of applications in real time. These help enterprises to deliver value and an enhanced experience to the users.

Aids continuous testing: Since the enterprise applications are run across platforms, devices, and networks, they should be tested continuously. This ensures the identification and mitigation of glitches or/and compliance and regulatory issues swiftly. The agile testing experts carry out necessary changes in the applications based on customer feedback on a continuous basis.

Swift turnarounds: Since glitches are identified and mitigated in real time and the development and testing teams are in constant communication, the development, integration, and delivery of software occur fast. Furthermore, there is little wastage of time when it comes to understanding the requirements and executing the specific activity in pursuance of testing.

Better communication: In the agile software testing process, the development and testing teams work in sprints. The moment the code of a module is written, it is passed on to the testing team within the sprint. If any glitch is found the same is removed and the code is passed on to the next sprint. Here, there is a greater cohesion between the teams leading to transparency, collaboration, and sharing of responsibilities. In fact, code development becomes a joint responsibility.

Facilitate and incorporate continuous feedback: The agile testing experts, besides testing the application continuously, facilitate the receipt and analysis of feedback from the end users. The feedback is taken into consideration to develop a quality compliant product.

Role of automation: One of the shortcomings of the waterfall model of testing is its overdependence on manual testing. This often leads testers to shun repetitive processes thereby missing out on testing many features and functionalities of the applications. The agile model of development and testing incorporates automation to validate the codes. It helps in executing tests such as performance, regression, usability etc. Also, by generating any number of virtual users, testers can validate features (and functionalities) across geographies, devices, platforms, and networks.

Conclusion

The agile testing strategy streamlines the development, testing and delivery of applications. Since the robust functioning of enterprise applications depends on myriad digital touchpoints and APIs, they should be validated for quality. Agile enhances the testing methodology and ensures glitches are identified and removed at the earliest.

Check out the White Paper, Agile Software Testing – Shifting to a New Paradigm.

[diyatestingupdates-blog]

This blog establishes the significance of Agile Testing and explains how it works differently as compared to the traditional testing patterns

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Check out these best practices for Agile UX Testing

Intense competition means that businesses need to ensure the quality of their products and achieve a faster time to market at the same time. This has brought about the concept of Agile testing services wherein testing and development processes are carried out concurrently. However, in this setup, it is the usability testing that has been relatively ignored.

A product has to meet the rigours of user expectations to achieve customer satisfaction. This calls for the integration of a customer feedback mechanism within Agile testing services. And once the customers’ feedback is taken into consideration, the product features can be duly enhanced based on the feedback. These will have a serious effect on pre-empting the inherent quality challenges and gaining user acceptance. To enhance the user experience of the products and services, Agile testing specialists should undertake the following steps.

Best practices for Agile UX testing

It has been observed that Agile testing specialists are not always on the same page as far as taking the customer feedback is concerned. This has given rise to the need for usability testing in the Agile enabled development sprint.

The best techniques and practices to achieve the same are given below.

Plan a thorough research: Carrying out a comprehensive research by involving the real users can be a costly and time consuming proposition, which has resulted in running UX scripts. The prevalent approach is of doing the usability testing at the end of the product development phase, which is often rushed or not taken to its logical conclusion. This is due to the fact that businesses keep a close watch on the turnaround time where usability testing does not account for much.

However, to gain a better user response to the products, the Agile testing approach should incorporate the conduct of a thorough research. The research should identify the specific user segment (read high priority users) that is likely to use the product more, and create suitable UX scripts. The Agile testers should obtain user responses through webcam/audio enabled recording of user experience.

In fact, the UX script can be made a part of each and every design and development iteration. This Agile testing approach, apart from fleshing out the inherent glitches in the code, can identify the features or functionalities that users find difficult to navigate at an early stage. This precludes the need for finding glitches post creation of the product prototype, thus resulting in time and cost effectiveness.

Coordinate with stakeholders: To realize the Agile application testing outcomes quickly, it is better to involve the stakeholders during the planning stage. If a common vision is set up, the developers and Agile testers can work in tandem in every possible way, including the writing and testing of UX scripts by high priority users.

Run small tests but recurrently: Testing the product by using a large user base can be a complex and time consuming exercise. Try the industry average of using a maximum of five users to validate the product. This way, around 80% of the usability issues can be sorted out before deploying the product. Importantly, even though the sample size is small Agile software testing should be carried out recurrently for each and every piece of the code.

Webcam enabled Agile software testing: Online remote tests conducted through screen and audio recording often run the risk of not targeting the desired user. On the other hand, a webcam enabled Agile application testing can give the testers better insights into the exercise. The insights can be in terms of understanding the UI, functionalities and test scenarios in real time. Also, QA testers can study the visual cues of actual users and figure out their reactions to the product. The ultimate aim is to test the products by high priority users and not just any user.

Conclusion

Carrying out usability testing in the Agile framework results in better understanding of the user expectations and perceptions about the product. This is a crucial cog in the wheel of the entire end to end SDLC that can deliver positive business outcomes.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, Check out these best practices for Agile UX Testing.