#agile software testing

With the increase in the complexity of the software development process, it is necessary to evolve the software testing approaches for keeping up with the software's development approaches. 

Agile testing approach is referred to as the latest buzz in the town, which focuses on smart testing, to launch a high quality of products in the market.

It is a must for the software developers and tests to collaborate properly in Agile Testing Approach to provide the best in class QA Services. So, the tester should offer the right feedback during the development cycle to the software development team.

Define agile testing

Agile testing refers to the software testing process, which regulates the different principles of agile software testing. The methodology of agile testing aligns with the Development Methodology in which the needs develop from the potential audience and testing teams gradually. 

This development of agile testing is aligned according to the needs of the customer.

Agile testing is not a sequential process; instead, it is known to be a continuous process. Such type of testing starts at the beginning of the project. Ongoing integration always exists between software development and testing. The ultimate goal of agile development and agile is getting a high quality of the product.

Agile testing methodologies

Here are some of the principal methodologies, which are involved in Agile testing:

BDD or Behavior Driven Development

For BDD or Behavior Driven Development, it is necessary to establish proper communication between different project stakeholders. It will offer a helping hand to the potential user so that every member can have an understanding of different features, before the beginning of the software development process. 

In BDD or Behavior Driven Developments, business analysts, software developers, and testers come up with the scenarios which ease focused communication.

The testers make sure to write the scenarios in a certain format. This format comprises of information, about a specific feature and how it acts in various situations with different input parameters. They are referred to as executable specifications as they are composed of inputs and specifications to the automated tests.

The ultimate goal of Behavior Driven Development or BDD is that the team generates scenarios after which they create tests around the specific scenarios, which fails at first and develops the software functionality in a way that the scenario will pass.

Here are some of the practices; a software tester should follow while using the BDD methodology:

 ·         Streamlining the documentation ensure an efficient software testing process

·         The tester should opt for a three amigos approach in which the owner of the product, the software developer and tester will work together for defining the tests and scenarios.

·         The software tester should develop automated tests and reuse the same across different scenarios.

ATDD or Acceptance test Driven Development

ATDD or Acceptance Test-Driven Development involves the developer, the customer and the tester. It is recommended to conduct Three Amigos meetings regularly to collect the input from different roles and using them for defining the acceptance tests.

While the potential audience focuses on the specific problem, the software developer looks for the solution of the problem. The tester, on the other hand, checks what can go wrong. The acceptance test represents the perspective of the user and identifies how the specific software will function. It is possible to automate the acceptance tests.

Here are some of the best practices; the software tester should follow while using ATDD technology:

·         The ATDD technology involves direct interaction with the customer for alignment of the expectations through different focus groups.

·         ATDD methodology involves the members of the team, facing the customers to understand the needs of the customer, including the sales representatives, customer service agents, and different account managers.

Exploratory testing

Exploratory testing is another integral part of agile testing in which the test design and test execution phase go hand by hand. Such kind of testing involves interacting with the working software, instead of separate planning, development and running of the tests.

Exploratory testing provides the prerequisite opportunity to the tester to play with the software in a chaotic manner. In the exploratory testing, the software testing will not document the process in which they will perform the testing of the software. But, in case they find an error, they will document it.

Here is a list of some of the principles, which are included in the exploratory testing process:

·         The exploratory testing involves the organization of the app functionality, with the aid of mind map and spreadsheet.

·         Though no detailed documentation is present about the performance of the tests, you need to find the specific software areas which are not included under the exploratory testing.

·         In exploratory testing, the tester should focus on different scenarios and areas of the software, which are at higher risk.

Through exploratory testing, the tester should make sure to document the specific results so that they are accountable for different areas of the software that they test.

Session-based testing

The primary goal of the session-based testing is to ensure software testing comprehensively. It includes the addition of different test characters which assists the software tester in understanding what they need to test and test different reports so that the tester can document everything they discover during the software testing.

The session-based testing is performed during the time-boxed sessions. Every session of the session-based testing includes face to face discussion between different testers, developers, managers. Here are some of the practices, which are involved in software testing in agile:

·         Running different uninterrupted testing sessions with predefined and fixed-length

·         Defining the objective so that the software tester is clear about different priorities of testing.

·         Documentation of notes, activities, and takeaways from face-to-face brief within the session report

The global digital revolution where individuals, businesses, organizations, and even governments are aiming at creating an online presence faces a slew of challenges. These include rising competition, complying with stringent regulatory standards, growing cyber security threats, and meeting customer expectations. Businesses, in order to stay competitive, need to deliver better quality products or services in shorter turnarounds with a provision for continuous improvement and delivery. Since software applications and the devices enabling them offer customers attributes like convenience, user friendliness, and time/cost savings, businesses have their task cut out. They are constantly under pressure to build applications with reduced time-to-market while keeping the latter’s quality and customer centricity top-notch. These are needed to stay competitive and retain or expand the market share.

Achieving the above-mentioned objectives can hit a roadblock thanks to the slow traditional waterfall model of software development. Here, the testing of a software application follows its development. Should the testing process come across glitches or bugs, the same are redirected to the development team for correction. The constant to-and-fro movement of a software application in the waterfall model results in delays. Moreover, since the waterfall model of testing is manual in character, the effectiveness of testing gets compromised. To get around the issue, businesses have begun using agile testing in a big way.

What is an agile testing approach?

Unlike the waterfall model, agile involves the development and testing of software applications concurrently. Here, cross functional teams (development and testing) operate in close collaboration wherein a code is validated in accordance with its expected outcome. An important facet of agile testing is the creation of a Scrum framework with scrum master as the facilitator. In a scrum, teams self-organize, drive changes (if any) and address complex problems. Let us find out how agile software testing can accelerate the process of software development. Importantly, fixing glitches earlier in the SDLC saves time, resources and cost.

Key Agile testing methods to accelerate software development

# Apply continuous integration: The objectives of incorporating agile is to establish an iterative process of software development involving continuous planning, testing, and integration. It allows people in the development and testing teams to collaborate in order to further quick decision making. One of the shortcomings of the traditional waterfall model is the delay in achieving code integration post testing. However, agile testing services put emphasis on continuous integration whereby the integrated code is placed in a shared repository for validation by an automated build. The aim is to build, test, and integrate the codes frequently for better identification of glitches.

# Automate testing: The agile testers write automated test scripts to check the codes against a host of parameters. This way, various aspects of a software application such as performance, usability, security, and functionality among others are validated against expected outcomes. Since automated test scripts can run non-stop 24x7 covering a wide scope of testing variables, there is a dramatic rise in the number of glitches identified unlike in its manual equivalent. As glitches are mitigated quickly and effectively, the process of software development is accelerated.

# Risk taking ability: Since the agile testing experts (and developers) can cut down risks by identifying and eliminating glitches early in the SDLC, the scope of failure decreases. This is achieved thanks to a constant communication and feedback mechanism adopted by the teams. With a reduction in the quantum of risks, the developers get better leeway to innovate and improve the quality of software with better features and functionalities.

# Better flexibility: When the development and testing teams collaborate in a sprint, there is better communication and exchange of ideas. To explain with an example, should a team think a approach to a proposed solution can give effective and timely results, the agile testing services have the requisite flexibility to adopt the same. Since the market dynamics and user preferences are changing faster than expected, the flexibility in the development and testing process is needed to meet the business objectives.

Conclusion

The Agile testing strategy is transparent, collaborative, and flexible. It encourages the exchange of ideas and knowledge sharing. Also, the responsibility of driving quality in the SDLC is a shared responsibility, which keeps everyone on their toes and prevents blame game should something go awry. The Agile testing methodology helps the businesses stay ahead in the competition curve besides engendering a culture of innovation.

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.

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.

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.

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.