Software Testing in Agile Environment

14 / Oct / 2015 by Neha Grover 6 comments

Introduction

In the past recent years that followed the invention of ‘Agile Manifesto’, which was written in a manner of great laconism, the IT industry has flourished inevitably on Agile Methodology. The existing IT organisations are waking up to the conveniences and efficiencies provided by Agile, and on the other hand the blooming organisations and start-ups are already taking the less-hurdled approach; the old traditional way of doing things is now not the smart way of doing things.
On the similar lines, Agile Methodology has revolutionized the testing part of software development. As crucial as it is, testing had been a subject of not much importance for a significant period of time until the presence of fierce competition was realized in the market. Long last, the focus shifted to the quality of products and, alas, saved the entire population of testers!

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How Agile is Helpful in Testing

1. Exposure: While in the traditional software development model, testing takes a backseat
and is often skipped to complete the project deadlines; in an Agile environment testing is
not only a mandatory phase but also goes on, in parallel, as long as the project lasts.

2. Absolute Involvement: Agile methodology is a continuously engaging methodology. From
Project Owners to Project Managers, to Team Leads, Developers, and to testers, at all times
have to be well-familiar about the state and business changes of the project. As a result of
which, the testing team, at any point in the software development life cycle, knows as
much as any other team member does.

3. Personal Growth: Top-notch quality of the product is one of the many important objectives
of Agile. It gives testers a chance to be creative and proactive in nature to keep up with the
upcoming business requirements which adds on to the personal growth of the tester.

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How Testing is Helpful in Agile

1. Revised Quality: The overall impact of testing builds the quality of the software product. The
product goes to multiple iterations of testing before the completion, and each iteration
ensures the fineness of the product.

2. Reduced Risk: The incremental-&-iterative nature of Agile helps the stakeholders learn
about the possible risks and flaws early in the process. Testers try with all their might to find
the loopholes in the system in each iteration, thereby preventing those errors to go further
in the next iterations. There is never a guarantee that there will be no surprises, but
continuous rounds of regression testing greatly minimize failures.

3. Thorough Testing: Testing does not deal with the functional aspect of the system alone but
it revolves around the overall system. Performance, security and user-interface are also of
the great importance to clients and end-users. Organisations, now a days, cannot get away
with the functional testing alone, testing team needs to be jack of all trades.

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comments (6)

    1. Anuj Verma

      So the point here is to make sure the testers get involved at a point where we freeze set of requirements. There on the engineering team can decide on the tasks to be accomplished for a ticket / user story where in Devs put in the tasks for changes they need to make and QAs put in tasks for all the testing efforts involved for the changes. Frequent reviews should take place between testers and developers where in-scope and out-scope of the functionality are discussed so that there is no gap between both of them regarding understanding of the functionality. Hence, Agile.

      Reply
      1. Neha Grover

        Correct. Also the fundamental idea behind coming up with Agile(or it could have been any other methodology, as far as the name is concerned) was the quick responsive nature to the dynamic and ever-changing requirements. IT companies wanted a model which is flexible as well as efficient in its working. But it proved to be much more beneficial than that; one of them being that it improved the state of testing team. Testing team gets involved from the very beginning and they are as important a part as any other team on the project.

        Reply
        1. Anuj Verma

          Rightly said, here the idea is not to divert from the business logic and yes the responsiveness of the model is what makes it the right candidate these days as the requirements may change even on daily basis. So the whole purpose is to keep up with the requirements and also not get driven away from the business model of the application. Otherwise, what gets developed might not be the same as what was required.

          Reply
        2. Shashank Saluja

          Hi Author ,

          The content of the blog seems excellent but the major business flaws with agile development that I am facing are as follows:
          1. The requirements are bound to change as the project goes along. The methodology, however, does not distinguish between big and small changes and every change has a cost which may be too high.
          2. There are huge defect backlogs, which keep on increasing as the development goes on. Not only fixing them is expensive , but it may introduce fresh defects in the application.
          3. How different are the risk management techniques in agile than other development models.

          We have a new start up , and we have our doubts over which development model should be used. Is there anyway we can address these issues using agile methodology?

          Reply

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