5 Reasons Why Your Application Testing Strategy Needs ‘Agile’ Intervention.

In an increasingly IT enabled digital landscape software applications are being launched at an alarming rate. This is primarily to thwart competition and garner the elusive customer pie by businesses. This development can be bracketed into two dimensions. One, customers have become tech savvy and want their software applications to be of the best quality. They also want the applications to be updated from time to time underpinned by the emerging technologies and threats.

The second dimension is about companies trying to keep pace with the changing customer preferences and market dynamics. Companies are indeed finding it challenging to meet the twin objectives of bringing applications (or their updates) at a faster rate and ensuring their quality each and every time. The latter requirement brings in the need for quality testing, which in the traditional waterfall model is not effective enough. To meet the evolving quality testing challenges, businesses have begun to implement Agile testing as the new testing approach.

The reason why Agile testing has gained ground amongst the testing community, not to speak of the other stakeholders, is the inadequacy of the traditional waterfall testing model. In a traditional testing setup, the testing is carried out post the development of an application. Since the testing here is primarily manual, its full rigour across deliverables and platforms is not carried out to its entirety. Moreover, it is difficult to carry out manual testing on a repetitive basis for all variables in each and every test environment. This reduces the test coverage area quite drastically.

In the final analysis, the traditional way of testing leaves a lot to be desired and lets glitches to go unchecked. Also, even when the glitches are identified and sent back to the development team for correction, the process consumes time. Moreover, the fact that the rewritten code needs to be tested again increases the lead time and cost of the project. The outcome of a poor test coverage area, lack of communication between the testing and development teams, lack of proper usability testing, and unrealistic schedules leads to the delivery of a poor quality application with less or no takers.

Agile test automation, on the other hand, is more coherent, time and cost saving, focused and helps in better identification and elimination of glitches. It helps in breaking silos between the development and testing teams, thus, accelerating the time to market with better quality applications. Let us delve into the five reasons in which Agile intervention can help the application testing strategy.

#1 Enhanced Quality: The Agile testing strategy involves the commencement of testing alongside the development process. It is a shift-left testing approach that validates the quality of software at the beginning of the SDLC. Here, testing forms a part of the development phase wherein the bugs are fixed simultaneously with the development of an application as opposed to the traditional model. This helps in reducing the SDLC and enhancing the product quality. In this model, the testing team gets early insights into the quality issues and helps the development team with better integration of the software codes.

#2 Comprehensive testing: Since the Agile testing strategy involves the use of automation, the Agile testing experts write test cases to carry out repetitive tests for a range of dependencies. Thus, they effectively coordinate and communicate with the development team in identifying new glitches in the codes. The test automation process helps in the conduct of complex and repetitive tests thereby increasing the test coverage area. This significantly increases the chances of identifying glitches and improves the quality of the application.

1. Accelerated time to market: Agile application testing identifies the presence of bugs quickly in the development phase thanks to its iterative model. The glitches are corrected and the code gets integrated in the overall end-to-end software application faster. Since the development and test cycles are reduced, the application is released into the market quickly. Moreover, the release of updates is done faster in the Agile set up leading to a better user experience.
2. Saving of cost: Since Agile application testing leads to a shorter product lifecycle and fewer test reruns, the development and testing cost comes down. Also, in an Agile test setup that incorporates automation, the software test tools and other resources can be centralized. This helps in the better procurement of resources leading to their better utilization and maintenance.

Moreover, as opposed to the traditional waterfall testing model where post development testing and integration increases the development cost, the Agile way is considerably better. Since the unit testing of codes is carried out alongside development, the quality of software post development is substantially better. As the software products are delivered faster with smaller lead times, the business saves costs. This helps the application in maintaining its competitive edge in the market.

#5 Better productivity: The Agile set up involves the presence of business stakeholders. This leaves a lesser room for confusion or ego issues that the development and testing teams suffer from in the traditional testing model. Since the Agile teams are better organized and cohesive as far as planning and implementation of the tasks are concerned, they are more efficient and productive. In the Agile setup, the teams have the authority to go about their business by the consent of the client thus increasing the ownership of the project.

Conclusion

The Agile testing methodology is more flexible, dynamic, and faster to address the requirements of testing. It is being adopted on a greater scale by enterprises as affirmed by Gartner (about 60 – 80%) and is far better than the traditional waterfall model of testing.