Life cycle and Benefits of Agile Testing Methodology

Synopsis: Today, organizations need tools and processes to accomplish fast delivery with minimal cost and excellence. Most of the concerns raised are on software stability. With an ever-evolving digital landscape, organizations that adapt to the new trends and keep pace with the rapid technological advancement can see a positive change in their business environment.

Software testing operates in silos or integrations, which can impact quality, speed and cost. Here, the Agile methodology comes to the rescue. Understanding the life cycle, benefits, and best practices of Agile testing methodology can help a lot.

Abstraction, designing, coding, testing and deployment in the traditional development process can take months for a project to complete before it is available to end-users. Furthermore, such an approach may fail to meet the important app demands.

Agile testing methodology is continuous and can start at the beginning of the project with continuous integration between development and testing.

What is Agile software development?

To understand this testing, it is important to understand what is involved in this development methodology. Agile testing involves several practices that are quite different from traditional development techniques.

Agile software development key principles and core values are:

Working on software is more important than detailed documentation
Ongoing customer collaboration is more vital than a fixed contract
Being responsible for a change instead of a fixed plan
Prioritizing Highlight people rather than processes and tools

In a traditional development approach, individual team members work together and pieces are combined to create the finished product.

Agile methodology focuses on responding to change. Teams can implement a framework like Scrum, Kanban, or Scrumban but a collaborative approach is important.

Agile allows continuous integration. The entire team collaborates and new features are added as they work. It creates a unique software development life cycle.

Agile testing life cycle

The traditional methodology requires the user to provide a detailed plan of pre-determined requirements for the intended software. Agile development gives flexibility because of its iterative technology.

Agile testing life cycle includes:

Planning sprints

Agile methodology has sprints as its base. It is an approach that takes large, complex projects and breaks them down into smaller manageable units. It is the pre-agreed period in which the team has to work on the set of requirements and finish them within the specified period.

This scene involves the product owner, developers and testers discussing the goals that need to be achieved in each sprint.

The daily tray needs to be maintained so that the team can talk about the tasks they are working on, what they have accomplished and any issues or obstacles that are holding back the work.

Designing test cases

For the testing team, it is important to match the rhythm with the development team. This team designs the test cases as per the requirements provided in the functional requirements document and the project design documents.

A test case design states how to set up the entire test technology. These designs allow quality tests to follow the enacted process. Documented test cases are then handed over to the QA manager and developers for review which helps in preventing errors.

Quality check and verification

This process is to check the quality of the software developed. As soon as the development is completed and made available to QA, the testing process starts. The Agile environment has teams working together to execute tests.

The role of QA here can include both testing and development. The idea is that developers and testers should be actively engaged in delivering code according to the client’s brief and completing the project.

QA helps to proactively address issues and potential bugs within an application during development cycles.

Regression and deployment

To examine the impact on existing functionality, manual and automated test cases are run after new user stories are added to the development process to deploy a quality product.

Regression testing helps development teams focus on new functionality while maintaining consistency with every new product enhancement. Teams use regression testing to ensure that the tested software continues to perform well after each modification.

Regression testing ensures that the code changes made do not let in any bugs in the software. This helps reduce the risk in the software developed and assures customers that the final product meets their expectations.

Review product sustainability

Apart from the freedom to add or remove features during development, it is also important to know and restrict the requirement flow and ensure product consistency.

Typically, a customer wants to add or remove some features, change their product, or even change their whole idea. Agile is about iterative development. In simple words, new requirements can be accommodated at any stage of the development process without adding any complexity.

The responsibility of the testing team is to validate requirement changes and maintain consistency. It is the final stage of this development cycle. After completing all development stages, the development team presents the results achieved after meeting the requirements.

Benefits of Agile methodology

Agile methodology saves time and money as less documentation is required. Considering the project deadline, this approach is more focused on the application rather than the documentation.

Being iterative in form, there is regular feedback from the end-user. Changes can be implemented as soon as possible.

Since all phases need to be completed expeditiously, there is transparency regarding the work done by each person working on the project during each phase.

Any changes or enhancements may be implemented without any budget constraints. These changes may require some adjustments in the already allotted time frame which may not be difficult.

Accelerated coding and testing make the management aware of the existing gaps in the requirements or technology used, and they can try to find a workable solution for the same.

Daily meetings and discussions on projects help identify any issues in advance and work on addressing them.

Best practices of Agile testing methodology

Effective practices of this testing methodology must typically address the following key traits:

The development team includes testers and QA managers as full members.
Leverage testers as active contributors to planning and requirements analysis.
Establishes team value whereby every team member is responsible for results, including quality.
Promote the importance of testers and encourage continuous feedback sharing with programmers and the customer.
Testers actively participate in meetings to define core business flows.
Testers carry out short iterative activities alongside developers.
Encourage maintenance of traceability between requirements, test cases and bugs.
Testers contribute to improving the user story.
Take advantage of the specialized skills of test-driven development, including unit testing, continuous integration and unit level.
Leverage automation testing is an important way to perform regression testing.

Conclusion

Agile methodology in testing has become a necessity in the testing process of the software development life cycle.

Most companies like Philips, Sky, JP Morgan Chase and others have already started implementing this testing method. If you haven’t implemented it yet, it’s time to embrace the Agile/agile testing process to reap the competitive advantages with custom software development.

Agile testing culture can be the best part of the test plan and strategy. Hire an efficient team where everyone is working towards helping you achieve your business goals.