#agile application testing

From the drawing rooms in Singapore to the beaches in Miami and the dorms in Oxford, Netflix serves its huge fan base with minimal interruptions and high-quality videos. This is made possible by a dedicated team of testers and engineers who offer unparalleled customer experiences by imbuing innovations to their agile testing approach. These innovations are implemented thanks to the all powerful open-source Selenium testing framework. The framework helps to address the challenges that are generally associated with the testing of dynamic web browsers or applications. In fact, Selenium acts as the saviour when it comes to the testing of colossal web applications such as Google, Fitbit, Hubspot, and Netflix.

What is Selenium?

Selenium is an open source framework for automated testing that emulates real-time user actions on different web browsers. Since the applications and web interfaces are getting complex over time, the Selenium testing strategy is becoming increasingly relevant and popular as well. It offers a suite of tools to take care of the various testing needs of software applications. Basically, a Selenium suite comprises four different kinds of tools.

1.Selenium RC

2.Selenium IDE

3.Selenium Grid

4.Selenium WebDriver

Today’s digital ecosystem is increasingly using agile application testing to address the inadequacies of manual testing as well as to meet the dynamically changing market requirements. Since this approach gives primacy to automation testing to test applications across the digital touchpoints – browsers, networks, devices, and operating systems, Selenium perfectly fits into the role as the facilitator of agile application testing.

Although this approach has made web testing much easier, the market has seen the advent of various testing tools, which are challenging the hegemony of Selenium. This raises a serious question: Is Selenium still indispensable for agile application testing of browsers or applications? Let us delve into the below mentioned factors to understand.

Needs third-party support

One of the greatest challenges of Selenium is that it needs the support of third-party tools for multi-tab testing, reporting, and scalability:

·         Scalability:

The Selenium testing approach offers the flexibility of running tests on almost any operating system and web browser. However, the number of tests it can run at once is still limited. The speed offered by a Selenium testing strategy depends on the node or hub configurations used by the testers. However, with the help of a cloud-based tool and Selenium grid, the testers can test in parallel.

·         Limited reporting facilities:

While Selenium has increased the capabilities of automated testing, it does not offer much reporting on its own. However, testers can set up an output folder with processes like execution time, pass/fail count and errors, etc. Also, third-party tools like CrossBrowserTesting can capture the screenshots of web browsers and share different reports through integrations like HipChat and Slack.

·         Multi-tab testing:

Multi-tab testing features are available in Selenium but can act as obstacles if testers fail to give the correct commands. For example, if the testers want to open a new tab to perform a specific task without closing the original, they need to go back to the parent tab to control both the tabs. The implementation of the SwitchTo method can help you to deal with such scenarios in web browser testing.

·         Pop Up windows:

Windows-based notifications or pop-ups create several challenges for any Selenium testing strategy. When a prompt or simple confirmation notification pops up during the testing process, it becomes difficult for Selenium to close or accept that notification. However, with the help of the SwitchTo method, these kinds of web-based alerts can easily be handled while keeping the browser in the background.

Challenges of flaky tests:

Selenium can generate flaky tests and timeouts for the testers. To eradicate such issues, the testers have to scrutinize the results properly with a head-on approach.

Mobile testing challenges:

Selenium can act on any web browser or operating system but its capability is very limited when it comes to the mobile testing process. For example, it is easier to test the web version of HubSpot on Safari with the help of Selenium but mobile Safari cannot give you the solution. In this scenario, Appium, a rival of Selenium, can serve the purpose of mobile testing. It is no surprise that developers are utilizing the functionalities of Appium for such mobile testing purposes where Selenium apparently fails.  

Conclusion:

Automation tools like Selenium can encounter several challenges as technologies continue to evolve. However, we cannot deny the fact that Selenium offers us a free open-source environment for agile testing. What would happen if Selenium decides to become a premium paid version? Remember, Selenium is not flawless but certainly helps testers by reducing the effort of manual testing. It still provides opportunities that are aligned with today’s testing narrative such as faster delivery, receiving instant feedback and offering small sections to handle. Hence, Selenium cannot go out of reckoning in an Agile testing scenario.

The paradigm of Agile has come about as businesses aimed at increasing revenue, lowering the cost of operations, and enhancing the customer experience. The three objectives are attainable provided the glitches in the software are removed or minimized, product lifecycle shortened, and the time to market accelerated. Agile has brought in its wake some clear and well defined business outcomes such as:

Improving quality and transparency

Building brand equity

Building and delivering value for the customer

Ability to leverage new technologies

Lowering costs

However, notwithstanding the initiatives of companies in going the Agile way, they often end up falling short of achieving the business objectives. The reasons can be many such as various units working in silos and not looking at the macro picture, department-wise initiatives not aligned with the overall enterprise goals, and development of misdirected software solutions. This is where businesses should implement the next-gen Agile operating model to provide a rich user experience at lower costs. In doing so, they need to adopt a set of Agile principles to stay in course of today’s high speed and competitive digital economy.

Change people’s perspective to change: No matter how many processes you implement and systems you install, if they are not backed by people in right earnest, they will not function to their optimum capacity. IT professionals should be aligned to the Agile testing model where development and testing of codes are carried out in sprints. The people (read IT professionals) should be encouraged to finetune the processes and tools to achieve better compliance and outcomes. The incorporation of Agile testing would need the changing of mindsets, organizational models, and management tools.

Run coordinated Agile software testing initiatives: Businesses often conduct intra departmental initiatives to garner incremental gains (performance, production, quality etc.) for their respective processes. Although such initiatives do speed up things at the departmental level, they seldom have any impact on the overall business objectives. In fact, should there be an impact at all, it is mostly intangible and unsustainable. If there is less or no coordination among departments, then outcomes such as delivering better customer service within the turnaround time can be lost.

Such an uncoordinated Agile testing strategy can lead to curious situations – improvement in departmental efficiencies but no impact on the overall cost and customer experience. Hence, the initiatives should be well coordinated to not only achieve departmental objectives but the organizational goal as well. The business in order to deliver a distinctive customer experience should focus on customer journeys and supporting internal processes. For example, the buying of groceries by customers from an eCommerce store would involve departments such as marketing, payments, IT, and logistics working in unison.  

This way a customer journey should be taken into consideration while devising the initiatives. So, instead of improving existing processes, organizations should focus on delivering the right customer experience. This can be achieved by simplifying processes and journeys to ensure customers are not overwhelmed and the final touchpoint remains an experience to remember.

No command and control approach: The traditional approach of running businesses is linear. In other words, business leaders assume that any change can be managed by staff since the latter is hired to do so. This top down linear model is mostly guided by the command and control approach, which is not the right way to achieve optimization goals. However, in the Agile model, individuals cutting across departments and processes create a culture based on feedbacks and learning. They can easily adapt to changes that are dictated by environments. Here, the speed of learning becomes the key differentiator in gaining the competitive advantage. Thus, the overall Agile process is more organic in nature and delivers better outcomes with collaboration and sharing.

Management as leaders and not bosses: Instead of the top down prescriptive approach, the role of management in the Agile setup should be that of an enabler. Consequently, leaders should identify the problem and allow teams to find out the way to solve it. This approach calls for flexibility, inclusivity, and adaptability to deliver the business objectives.

Conclusion

To beat the competition and stay on course to achieve success, businesses should adopt the Agile way of operating. The new perspective on Agile would achieve a greater cohesion among departments, better identification and elimination of process flaws, and faster delivery of products and services.

In a growing data driven world the seamless functioning of software applications is not just important but critical as well. The successful functioning of a software program(s) can help an enterprise in many ways. These can be related to brand building, achieving customer satisfaction, drawing potential customers, and improving the ROI. And yes, not to forget, ensuring the compatibility of the application across devices, browsers, operating systems, platforms and networks.

Today, a software program or application can have security ramifications as well given the growing threat of cybercrime. So, if an application gets compromised, it can lead the business to fall foul of regulatory authorities, lose customer trust and competitive edge, and the failure to meet ROI. To prevent these, a rigorous Agile testing of software should be implemented. In this type of testing, Agile testers check for glitches in the application and send the code(s) back to the development team for rewriting.

Even though implementing Agile is arguably the best way to ensure the robustness and seamless functioning of an application across platforms, devices, and networks, it does not always include testing the API. This is due to the fact that an API automation testing can be a daunting exercise given the complexity involved. The complexity lies in understanding the connections and interactions between applications, systems, databases, devices, frameworks, and networks.

What is an API?

The Application Program Interface is a set of tools, processes and protocols that communicate across programs, systems, databases and networks. Also, an API helps to integrate different parts of an application to facilitate the latter’s smooth functioning and performance in accordance with the stated business objectives. An API is akin to a user interface that facilitates communication between a human and a computer. In the absence of an API, various strands of an application(s) will not be able to optimally function let alone meet the desired objectives.

The bottom line is that an API is the glue that holds a software application(s) together. It helps the application to interact with the systems, devices, databases, and networks to produce the desired outcome. The role of APIs has become even more important today thanks to the proliferation of innovative and result oriented software incorporating cutting edge technologies.

How critical is API testing?

As mentioned above, the growing complexity of software applications in meeting the challenges of a competitive business environment means they should be tested preferably with Agile test automation. Since APIs are the critical components of software applications, API testing has become important. Their seamless functioning helps software applications to interact with each other and perform to their optimum. This invariably leads to a superior customer experience and realization of ROI. Testing of the APIs validates the integration of various software components and dependencies to effectively meet the performance metrics and security parameters.

Steps to effectively implement Agile for testing the APIs

#1 Test automation: The use of automation in an Agile testing strategy is critical as the level of interaction between developers and testers in a sprint is high. Manual testing will not be able to cope with the challenges of shorter development cycles, which involve repetitive testing of a large number of variables. The variables need to be tested for outcomes across frameworks, operating systems, browsers, IDEs and networks. By using API test automation tools like Soap UI, API Fortress etc., and calls can be sent to an API to check and log the system’s response.

#2 Documentation: The API test requirements such as the purpose, functions and features, integrations supported, and workflow should be documented. This helps in better planning and implementation of the test.

#3 Define the test output parameters: The test outcomes can range from checking the pass/fail status to calling another API(s) or validating a data. In fact, there can be times when there is no discernible output as well.

#4 Focus on smaller API functions: Instead of creating bigger test cases given their complexity and uncertainty, it is better to focus on the smaller ones. This is due to the fact that it is easier to write smaller API test codes and check for their outcomes. These small API test cases can be later clubbed together to save time.

#5 Security Testing: The Agile application testing should include API security testing as well given its dire ramifications. The test should be able to validate the authenticity of a user by checking his or her credentials from the database with an API function.

Conclusion

The testing of an API function through Agile methodology leads to a better identification of glitches and proper quality validation. The test outcome has a bearing on the seamless functioning of applications, which can lead to an enhanced customer experience.

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.

Quality is not only an attribute of the software product but also that of the development procedure followed to build it. The first consideration to any quality assurance is - are we building the correct product and if so are we building it correctly. Agile Software Testing methodologies adhere to the very well defined rules in its manifesto

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

In Agile Testing, the customer's perspective is taken into consideration as early as possible. Testing is done as code is written and is stable enough for unit level testing. Since testing is done often with every increment of the working software, it is done by automated testing. Manual Agile testing is more likely to result in flawed product or delayed time line. Agile testing covers all types of testing. They can be defined into the following main four.

• Functional Testing • Exploratory Testing • Unit Testing • Performance and Load Testing

Main Testing Practices:

• Paired Programming • Test Driven Development • Continuous Integration • Automated Unit Tests • Automated Functional Tests • Restructuring Code without altering corresponding functionality • Defining 'done' clearly.

Testing Approaches:

• Scrum: This concentrates on the task management within a team. It implements working in small teams. Each iteration of a scrum is called a Sprint. All the details of the end product are entered in the product backlog. The top items of the product backlog are selected and listed in the Sprint backlog. The team checks for the daily work the Sprint backlog. The team then delivers the product functionality after each sprint.

• Kanban: This framework can be better defined through its difference with scrum. Here there in no definite sprint size, optional prioritization of product backlog and adding items whenever possible.

• Crystal Methodologies: This is based on the concept of chartering, cyclic delivery and wrapping up. Chartering involves the creation of development team, feasibility analysis and defining the development methodology. In delivery cycles, the team implements and reviews a subset of the requirements. Then the entire developed software is deployed and reviews are performed.

• Extreme Programming: This approach is very useful when the requirements are constantly changing and evolving. The product is frequently released in short development cycles called iterations. This introduces a checkpoint where additional requirements can be easily implemented. There are six phases in this method which are Planning, Analysis, Design, Implementation, Wrapping and Closure.

• Dynamic Software Development Model (DSDM): The main focus of DSDM is frequent delivery. It is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) approach. DSDM consists of seven main phases which are self explanatory in their terminologies. They are Pre-project, Feasibility Study, Business Analysis, Functional Model Iteration, Design and Development Iteration, Implementation and Post Deployment.

• Development of Lean Software: It is a just-in-time production approach which basically aims at increasing development cost and decreasing cost. The main steps of this system are Waste Elimination, Amplification of learning, deferring commitment, early delivery, team integrity and empowerment and optimization of the whole.

• Feature Driven Development: Unlike other approach, this method focuses on the separate accomplishment of each feature.

Conclusion: