#agile testing framework

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How to transform QA in Agile-based Organizations

Digitization has brought in speed, convenience, accessibility, quality, and cost rationalization as major benefits for the customers. The traditional management practices are often unable to achieve those benefits in real-time. With a rapidly changing digital landscape and the need to address the challenges posed by shifting customer preferences and growing competition, enterprises are embracing the agile development methodology. According to the agile testing approach, quality assurance is more about ‘test fast’ rather than ‘test everything.’ Consequently, QA, in order to keep up with the pace-driven agile model of software development, needs to adapt.  

It needs to fully integrate into the build cycle from the traditional ‘find bugs at the end of the development’ approach. Agile testing entails the QA to be present in the end-to-end value chain, which means right from the ideation stage to the development and integration of code, product delivery, and beyond. The reason why many enterprises, even after adopting the agile way of development, continue with the traditional model of QA, is the absence of an agile culture.

To ensure the success of an agile testing approach, the QA team needs to unlearn some of the shibboleths. These may include the following:

·        Testing is a distinct process exclusive of development and delivery

·        Test automation is only for regression purpose

·        The ultimate goal of the QA team is to detect bugs

How to transform traditional QA into an agile testing framework?

QA forms a critical component in the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) value chain of enterprises following the agile testing methodology. And to ensure the reliability of CI/CD outcomes, QA should be embedded at every step of the build-test-delivery process. In agile-based organizations, the release management process can shift to the combined development and QA team from the operations team. This enables the QA team to view the end-to-end product delivery process thereby identifying and fixing bottlenecks (if any). Enterprises should go about transforming their QA processes by taking the following approach:

·        Increasing the level of test automation

·        Improving the testing skills of the QA team

·        Developing a strategy to incorporate AI in the agile testing methodology through analytics, RPA, and self-learning

Focus on problems to achieve better solutions: The Agile testing services should focus on the bottlenecks that prevent the integration of QA into the build cycle instead of the solution. It is only by analyzing the bottlenecks and finding a way to fix them that the QA team can deliver the final product, quickly and consistently. In doing so, the QA team can choose various agile test automation tools.

Upgrading the skillset of testers: The lack of knowledgeable agile testers is one of the reasons why enterprises shy away from implementing agile. According to the World Quality Report, around 42% of respondents cited a lack of expertise in agile testing for not implementing agile in its true form. The testers should have the programming knowledge to create test automation scripts and access the underlying business logic. They should be able to analyze the code and make improvements from the perspective of performance. Hence, before implementing test automation, upskill the QA team into the nitty-gritty of agile application testing.

Embracing test automation: One of the prominent features of implementing agile testing is automation. It helps to speed up the testing process and identifies (and fixes) glitches that are often missed during manual testing. So, not only regression testing, the QA team should focus on extending agile test automation to other test types like smoke testing. Developers should play a crucial role in enabling the QA team to set up automation or conduct exploratory testing.

Adopting RPA: Robotic Process Automation can drive high performance in the IT systems by reducing the level of end-to-end testing. It helps to automate tedious processes, reduce glitches, and remove drudge work, thereby allowing the QA team to focus more on exploratory testing or other important activities. It is more about automating the processes by using the correct functionality.

Real-time testing: Although test virtualization can mimic the test scenarios and parameters on the cloud, real-time testing is a different ballgame altogether. It allows testers to identify the functional issues, which can only be found in the real world. Real-time testing can be handy when it comes to testing during peak periods and is a valuable proposition for brands to expand their test coverage.

Conclusion

Organizations are becoming agile to stay competitive and deliver the best user experience to their users. However, traditional QA needs to adapt to the build ecosystem that agile entails. The first step in this transition is embracing a culture change where QA becomes a cumulative responsibility of both the development and testing teams.

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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.

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Agile Test Governance Framework For Delivering Quality@speed

Check out this white paper to know more about how Agile Test Governance Framework For Delivering Quality@speed.

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How to implement DevOps in the Agile Testing agenda?

The business imperative of achieving customer satisfaction has necessitated the seamless functioning of both development and operations teams in a cohesive manner. This move beyond Agile has enabled businesses to achieve the twin objectives of delivering more software releases and enhancing their quality at the same time. The adoption of DevOps initiatives has brought in concepts like Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Testing (CT), and Continuous Delivery (CD). And of the three, Continuous Delivery has been found to be quite a challenge for businesses.

The minefield of implementing DevOps

The difficulties in achieving a seamless CT are manifold. These range from leveraging multiple tools, teams, services, and experts as opposed to the use of tools and teams for CI/CD. Moreover, implementing DevOps requires the adoption of total quality culture by people, processes, and technologies. And in a silo driven organization, this can be a minefield to tread especially when legacy systems are needed to be married with the latest technologies and methodologies. This is where implementing DevOps testing becomes paramount.

Adopting DevOps does not mean overhauling the entire IT architecture of an organization. On the contrary, it harps on achieving a greater communication and collaboration between teams. The task becomes even more challenging when there is regulatory compliance to be met without changing the overall organizational structure.

In most business set ups, the development, testing, and operations teams operate in silos with different job descriptions and responsibilities. However, implementing DevOps in the Agile testing agenda would entail each of these departments to work together with a unified purpose. However, before delving into the ways to achieve the above objective, let us first know why DevOps as a methodology was conceived.

Reasons for the emergence of DevOps

The varying needs of a modern  IT organization related to quality, scalability, accelerating time to  market, and customer experience are difficult to achieve in the presence of multiple teams functioning with different priorities, cultures, and goals.

Lack or poor communication and collaboration between the development, testing, and operations teams.

A faster pace of growth of digital technologies as opposed to the slower pace of teams in adopting, mplementing, and managing them.

Implementing DevOps in the Agile Testing agenda

If Agile is about developing and delivering glitch free products in the market by adopting the first test approach, then DevOps goes a step forward in offering a rich customer experience throughout the product lifecycle. It does so by providing incremental updates to the application from time to time. And to ensure the same, the following steps are needed to be taken.

Implementing DevOps test automation: The key to this lies in selecting open source tools such as Selenium to get away from scalability issues arising out of licensing constraints. This way a dynamic regression testing can be carried out faster with the generation of release notes. The DevOps specialists can create suitable test cases traceable to the code files and test scenarios based on application changes.

Implementing a quality culture: Since a traditional organizational setup has siloed departments with varied priorities, processes, and goals, a DevOps testing strategy should involve all stakeholders to imbibe a total quality culture. According to this culture, quality will not be the sole prerogative of a particular department but of everyone concerned (including business analysts and management.) The processes of each department should be aligned to ensure quality deliverables for the customers. This is of utmost importance as DevOps calls for the merging of expertise, best practices, and thought processes across functions in the SDLC and beyond. A ‘system thinking’ needs to be inculcated across departments wherein each team should be aware of the action of the other and quickly deliver high quality software with less or no glitches.  

Implementing Continuous testing/integration/delivery: Since a software product is not static and needs updation from time to time to meet the technological and business challenges of the day, it needs to undergo continuous testing a la DevOps. Continuous testing entails the execution of end to end automated tests and receiving constant feedback from users on the quality of the product. It can provide insights into the probable business risks that a software can face when released into the market.

Conclusion

DevOps should be implemented in right earnest to ensure a software product stands in good stead as far as delivering a good customer experience is concerned. It should involve the use of test automation tools to ensure the delivery of a risk free software for customers.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, How to implement DevOps in the Agile Testing agenda?

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5 Reasons Why Your Application Testing Strategy Needs ‘Agile’ Intervention.

In an increasingly IT enabled digital landscape software applications are being launched at an alarming rate. This is primarily to thwart competition and garner the elusive customer pie by businesses. This development can be bracketed into two dimensions. One, customers have become tech savvy and want their software applications to be of the best quality. They also want the applications to be updated from time to time underpinned by the emerging technologies and threats.

The second dimension is about companies trying to keep pace with the changing customer preferences and market dynamics. Companies are indeed finding it challenging to meet the twin objectives of bringing applications (or their updates) at a faster rate and ensuring their quality each and every time. The latter requirement brings in the need for quality testing, which in the traditional waterfall model is not effective enough. To meet the evolving quality testing challenges, businesses have begun to implement Agile testing as the new testing approach.

The reason why Agile testing has gained ground amongst the testing community, not to speak of the other stakeholders, is the inadequacy of the traditional waterfall testing model. In a traditional testing setup, the testing is carried out post the development of an application. Since the testing here is primarily manual, its full rigour across deliverables and platforms is not carried out to its entirety. Moreover, it is difficult to carry out manual testing on a repetitive basis for all variables in each and every test environment. This reduces the test coverage area quite drastically.

In the final analysis, the traditional way of testing leaves a lot to be desired and lets glitches to go unchecked. Also, even when the glitches are identified and sent back to the development team for correction, the process consumes time. Moreover, the fact that the rewritten code needs to be tested again increases the lead time and cost of the project. The outcome of a poor test coverage area, lack of communication between the testing and development teams, lack of proper usability testing, and unrealistic schedules leads to the delivery of a poor quality application with less or no takers.

Agile test automation, on the other hand, is more coherent, time and cost saving, focused and helps in better identification and elimination of glitches. It helps in breaking silos between the development and testing teams, thus, accelerating the time to market with better quality applications. Let us delve into the five reasons in which Agile intervention can help the application testing strategy.

#1 Enhanced Quality: The Agile testing strategy involves the commencement of testing alongside the development process. It is a shift-left testing approach that validates the quality of software at the beginning of the SDLC. Here, testing forms a part of the development phase wherein the bugs are fixed simultaneously with the development of an application as opposed to the traditional model. This helps in reducing the SDLC and enhancing the product quality. In this model, the testing team gets early insights into the quality issues and helps the development team with better integration of the software codes.

#2 Comprehensive testing: Since the Agile testing strategy involves the use of automation, the Agile testing experts write test cases to carry out repetitive tests for a range of dependencies. Thus, they effectively coordinate and communicate with the development team in identifying new glitches in the codes. The test automation process helps in the conduct of complex and repetitive tests thereby increasing the test coverage area. This significantly increases the chances of identifying glitches and improves the quality of the application.

#3 Accelerated time to market: Agile application testing identifies the presence of bugs quickly in the development phase thanks to its iterative model. The glitches are corrected and the code gets integrated in the overall end-to-end software application faster. Since the development and test cycles are reduced, the application is released into the market quickly. Moreover, the release of updates is done faster in the Agile set up leading to a better user experience.

#4 Saving of cost: Since Agile application testing leads to a shorter product lifecycle and fewer test reruns, the development and testing cost comes down. Also, in an Agile test setup that incorporates automation, the software test tools and other resources can be centralized. This helps in the better procurement of resources leading to their better utilization and maintenance.

Moreover, as opposed to the traditional waterfall testing model where post development testing and integration increases the development cost, the Agile way is considerably better. Since the unit testing of codes is carried out alongside development, the quality of software post development is substantially better. As the software products are delivered faster with smaller lead times, the business saves costs. This helps the application in maintaining its competitive edge in the market.

#5 Better productivity: The Agile set up involves the presence of business stakeholders. This leaves a lesser room for confusion or ego issues that the development and testing teams suffer from in the traditional testing model. Since the Agile teams are better organized and cohesive as far as planning and implementation of the tasks are concerned, they are more efficient and productive. In the Agile setup, the teams have the authority to go about their business by the consent of the client thus increasing the ownership of the project.

Conclusion

The Agile testing methodology is more flexible, dynamic, and faster to address the requirements of testing. It is being adopted on a greater scale by enterprises as affirmed by Gartner (about 60 – 80%) and is far better than the traditional waterfall model of testing.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, 5 Reasons Why Your Application Testing Strategy Needs ‘Agile’ Intervention.

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Check out this white paper that explains how Agile Software Testing metrics helps organizations deliver better software in a timely manner.

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Check out this case study to know how Cigniti's Assessment Methodology leverages CMMI, TMMI and TPI models to deliver customized QA framework for IT operations that support annual transactions of over $80 billion.