Develop a Coherent Strategy for Your Testing Capabilities Towards Agile & Automation

Agile approaches are becoming increasingly popular in software development around the world. They necessitate a new approach to software testing that is ideally aligned with Agile’s fast-paced philosophy. Although test automation was not designed with Agile teams in mind, it does make Agile testing a critical component of the Agile concept.

Any agile development process includes automated testing as a core component. Test automation becomes even more critical as we progress toward continuous deployment because of the immediate input it offers to the development team on the application’s health.

Automated testing must be run continually, be quick, and the test results must be consistent and dependable in order to obtain this immediate feedback. The majority of verifications should be conducted as part of the development of new features in order to fulfil these aims.

To put it another way, development and testing should be seen as one coherent activity, and quality should be built in from the beginning by verifying that what is being developed works and does not hamper existing functionality.

This necessitates “transposing the test automation hierarchy,” which entails pushing GUI tests that take a long time to perform to lower levels, such as the API layer, which can run directly after the unit tests as part of the build to provide the initial level of confidence.

Transposing the Test Automation Hierarchy

We need to reduce the number of automated tests performed at the GUI layer as part of our test automation plan. While performing automated tests through the GUI delivers good and useful tests in terms of emulating a user’s interaction with the app, it has a number of drawbacks:

Slow page load time – since tests are run through the GUI, page load times can add a significant amount of time to the entire testing duration, and as a result, feedback to developers is slow.

Brittle tests – as the tests rely on html locators to determine which web items to interact with, they fail as soon as the ID changes, incurring a significant amount of maintainability costs.

Limited testing – because the GUI may not display all of the facts from the web response to allow verification, the tester’s ability to completely validate a feature may be limited.

GUI automated tests have the lowest return on investment (ROI) due to the issues outlined above.

The automated browser tests should be limited to a bare minimum and will be used to replicate a user’s behavior by combining common user flows with end-to-end scenarios in which the entire system is tested.

Because agile development is a continuous delivery process with fewer repetitions during development and deployment, agile testing with automation often doesn’t work out well. As a result, QA teams perform short and quick regression testing, making it more difficult for testers to locate, correct, and test the product.

Giving enough time to any type of testing, including automation testing, is the solution to this problem. This can be accomplished by running multiple parallel tests to save time, which improves team morale and productivity, improves quality, and allows your testers to debug and do more exploratory testing.

Agile Test Automation in Practice

Consider automation as a vital aspect of agile development and use an agile test automation method to make the testing process more effective and orderly.

The two key traps that you should avoid in agile automation testing, according to most testers:

1. For the process to be realistic, there must be a space for automation in every delivered feature, or every test must be automated.
2. Automation must be used when deploying a new feature or when performing regression testing where rapid and repeated testing is necessary.

100% code coverage is a fallacy; no amount of automated or human testing can ensure that software code is completely covered. Covering the full code base also does not ensure the test’s quality or relevance.

As a realistic strategy in automation testing, one-to-one translation of tests can be employed for higher quality and performance. Even so, one-to-one translation will not provide you with complete coverage of your application because the entire procedure cannot be automated.

Compact test cases result in more effective automation testing in agile development since they are not only easy to execute but also allow for rapid adjustments in response to regression requirements.

Conclusion

Due to reasons such as continuously changing requirements, a lack of information, technical capabilities, or inappropriate quality assessment, digital firms’ quality assurance and testing teams often struggle to strike the right balance between application stability and time-to-market. A high-quality product is essential for enhancing the customer experience and ensuring long-term business growth.

Cigniti has long been a valued agile testing partner for businesses at varying stages of Agile adoption. We’ve assisted companies with QA planning, estimating, and metric identification in their sprints, resulting in a seamless integration of their sprint teams to boost test coverage and deliver quality at high-speed.

While our expertise in quality engineering practices like DevOps, CI/CD, agile testing, and robust test automation aid in quality assurance and control, other testing techniques like functional testing, performance testing, and more ensure that a “potentially shippable product increment” is delivered with every sprint at Cigniti.

Need help? Consult our experienced team of Agile Testing and Test Automation experts to learn more about developing a coherent strategy for your testing capabilities towards Agile and Automation.