Unveiling Agile Testing and its Unknown Challenges In this technological era, it has become really important for the companies to fast-track the deliveries of their products. To deliver the best quality products, companies are embracing agile development to generate small chunks of software all through the development lifecycle. They need to shorten the cycles and hearten their testers to test every build. Agile testing is an enduring and a continuous process that allows the development teams to accelerate the delivery time.
Agile testing adds new dimensions and areas of focus to the testing teams. One such area is when the testing of a product happens not in one significant location, but in a dispersed environment with each unit catering to an individually critical component of the software. The measure of diversity in the business models and technology authorization in these distributed environments stance significant challenges. Let’s examine the foremost ones: • Recurrent Changes • Testing Tools Supporting the Agile Testing Process • Flexible Testers with Manual and Automation Testing Skillsets
The commencement of the agile methodologies has significantly changed the software testing processes. These methodologies have the competence to offer better ways of delivering software. On the other hand, agile methodologies also carry some grave challenges that can immensely impact the entire testing process. Numerous agile testing teams struggle with the customary test management and automation tools which often seem intractable to be used in such a rapid development environment. The legitimacy of the matter is that traditional testing tools cannot work in agile environs. They are intended to work at the end of the project, while the agile model is designed in a way that development and testing can work together with each other. Furthermore, the testers should be very proficient in using these tools. The cost of authorizations for these tools is really expensive and different tools are required for different testing phases, most of which work in silos. Therefore, identifying the right automation tool is an extremely important aspect and is always good to have a single solution/ tool to carry the competency to achieve different testing types, which can be succeeded with the agile test management. Additional challenges like receiving the changing requirements result in the charges in the behavior of the product in almost every cycle. The rapid pace of iteration might not result in producing quality tests. Codes that worked well earlier might get affected with the new features added in each subsequent sprint. This will again increase the risk of regression. Not conducting the review meetings with the test teams, not updating the documents may drive the teams to a lot of troubles. Likewise, companies cannot automate everything and automating the change prone areas is not a great move as it can result in heavy reworking. Sometimes regression testing from the functionality perspective works well but from performance and security perspectives, it might lead to latent issues. If functional, performance and security testing are to be performed, different testers with different skillsets and different testing environments with different tools are required. All these challenges make it very hard for the companies to accomplish continuous testing activities and quality testing in short test cycles.
What should be done? The ability of a company to be efficient and productive, respond quickly in a changing agile environment while still managing to produce top quality results through continuous testing completely depends on selecting the right tool which can complement the agile testing practice. A tool that carries comprehensive end-to-end testing capability with agile test management with a holistic approach also needs to tackle ad hoc changes by keeping the Audit trail logs and versions. The tool should be user-friendly, easy to handle and fast enough to change requests anytime. The tool should be supportive to handle the entire testing life cycle starting from the requirements to the bug posting. If a tight tool is ready, the testing team will be able to focus more on allocating the right tasks to
the right people. The most significant element in the agile environment is the shared responsibility to achieve the highest quality. The quality of the software is certainly everyone’s concern and the shareholders make the decisions about the depth and amount of the testing activities throughout the development process. If everything sets safe and sound, then agile testing would certainly be the most adopted testing methodology in near future. Looking for Experts in Agile Testing? BugRaptors is a CMMi5 certified quality assurance company with an extensive experience in different testing techniques. Visit their website here for more insights.
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