In this fast-paced technology world, it has become imperative for the companies to accelerate continuous timely delivery of their software products. To deliver quality products continuously, companies are adopting agile development to generate small chunks of working software throughout the development life cycle. They need to truncate the cycles and encourage their testers to test every build. Agile testing is an ongoing and a nearly continuous process which allows the development teams to significantly expedite time to deliver.
The Major Challenges in Agile Testing are:
- Frequent Changes
- Testing Tools to Support Agile Testing Process
- Adaptable Testers with Manual and Automation Testing Skillset
The inception of agile methodologies has changed software testing dramatically. These methodologies have the capability to offer better ways of delivering software. However, agile methodologies also carry some of serious challenges that can make a huge impact on the overall testing process.
Many agile testing teams struggle with traditional test management and automation tools which often seem unadaptable to be used in such a quick development environment. The reality of the matter is that traditional test tools cannot work in an agile environment. They are designed to work at the end of the project, whereas the agile model is designed in a way that development and testing will work in tandem with each other.
Moreover, testers should be very proficient in using these tools. The cost of licenses for these tools is very expensive and for different testing phases, different tools are required and most of the tools work in silos. Identifying a right automation tool is therefore an extremely important aspect and it is always good to have a single tool/solution that carries the capability to perform different types of testing which can be managed by the agile Test management.
Other challenges like receiving changing requirements even late in development will result in changes in the behavior of the product in almost every cycle. Quick pace of each iteration might not result in producing quality testing. Code that worked well in previous sprint will be effected by the new features added in each subsequent sprint. This will again increase the risk of regression. Not updating documents for reference, not conducting review meetings involving the test teams and no commitment on sprint durations would drive a testing team into a lot of troubles.
Additionally, companies cannot automate everything and automating the area which is prone to changes is not a good move because it will result in heavy rework. Sometimes regression testing from functionality standpoint works fine but from performance and security standpoints, it might lead to potential issues. If functional, performance and security testing has to be performed, different resources with different skill set are required and different testing environment with different tools are also needed. All these challenges make it very difficult for companies to implement continuous testing activities and quality testing within short test cycles.
What to do!
The ability of a company to be productive and efficient, respond quickly in a changing agile environment while still managing to generate top quality results through continuous testing completely depends on selecting a right tool which can complement agile testing practice.
A tool that carries comprehensive end-to-end testing capability with agile test management with a holistic approach also needs to handle ad-hoc changes by maintaining Audit Trail, versions and logs.
The tool should be user-friendly, fast and easy to handle any change request any time. The tool should be supportive to handle entire testing life cycle starting from requirements till bug posting. If a right tool is in place, then a testing team can focus more on assigning right tasks to right people. A key element in agile environment is the shared responsibility to achieve the highest quality.
Quality is definitely everyone’s concern and stakeholders make the decision about the amount and depth of testing activities throughout the entire development process. If everything is set all right, then agile testing would be the most adopted in the coming future.
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