Dollars to Doughnuts, automation testing in today’s Agile world is quite tedious. It isn’t about pushing testers in a deadlock, but rather to prepare them for oncoming challenges and to find shortcuts accordingly.
You should fuel your thought process and ask yourself questions like why companies are moving away from waterfall?
Where did companies fail when using waterfall?
And in what ways is the agile approach better than waterfall?
What sort of challenges arise when adopting the agile methodologies?
Etc.
Tracking down the challenges and hindrances when switching to a new process is crucial and painstaking. Testers opting for the agile environment encounter the following challenges:
- Planning relevant test suite, strategy, test automation framework, or test model is critical. Plus, over-planning can be complicated. Therefore, testers should focus on More Viable Product (MVP) strategy. While automation testing devoid of accurate planning crashes the testing structure when a change is made.
- Sometimes, when the clients’ push for delivery, software testing experts have no choice but to compromise the quality. Hasty tasks only end up in creating a messier end-product.
- Agile is more of a “Whole-Team-Approach” that assures that tester is not the only one testing, coding, and reviewing the product. The development model puts everyone on the same page and makes them feel liable being a part of the project and the responsibility it’s their responsibility to maintain the product QA.
- Functional testing is tougher that UI balancing in agile.
- The manually done integration and system testing get cumbersome when transformed into an automated scenario.
- Most importantly, training and updating testers for a whole new domain is difficult since concepts like CI/CD, get a bit tricky in the Agile environment.
So, what you actually need to know when shifting to the Agile world?
Here, find your answers:
Automation Testing at Services Level
In Agile, testing teams work extensively to meet the business requirements at the system and service level since the user interface is the very first element that goes through changes. The Agile approach reduces the UI maintenance efforts and intensively diverts the focus on increasing the test coverage on the service and system level.
Code Coverage and Time Management
Agile-based test automation enjoys streamlined time management accompanying the well-executed traceability matrix. Testers use specific instrumented modules that assist in enhanced coverage of every test step and cynically digs out the areas gone through less coverage and observation.
Manual Testing is subsidiary in Agile
As mentioned earlier, testers that manually execute system, integration, and regression testing would be required to take a shift and adapt to the innovative Agile model. Because under a strict timeframe, testers and companies do not have another way out but choosing agile to better automate their testing practices.
Choosing a Tool
With the Agile evolution, new tools, software, and apps have also emerged to assist the testers to learn agility more effectively. There can be many reasons, a company chooses a specific tool where time and cost constraints lie above all. There are multiple open-source and commercial tools available in the market. Choose one and begin the testing in your agile world!
Sharing the Code
Since you and your team members work on cross-sectional sharing of ideas and mindsets, it becomes a casual practice for testers to share different testing codes and final tested product with their team. This activity includes gathering expert reviews and advice from every team member and makes that particular product more prolific and powerful in the end.
So, whenever you plan to switch to the agile environment, you know what to do.
