Agile testing refers to a software testing methodology that follows several principles of agile software development. In comparison with waterfall testing, agile testing needs continual engagement between developers, customers, managers, stakeholders, and testers. Testing is a crucial component of each phase of the developmental process within Agile.
Which testing is done in agile and how is agile testing different?
All the types of functional testing you may do in Waterfall are also applicable in an agile testing project. The only differentiating factors are that agile testing prefers more of automated testing, quicker communication between team members and faster delivery of smaller iterations of work. There are some testing approaches that are more suited to Agile namely Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) and Exploratory Testing. Each iteration carries along some regression work from the prior cycles that has to be automated and tested rapidly.
Why Agile testing is important?
Agile testing enables all the testers and developers to work together and thereby enhancing the quality and speed of deliveries. One cannot use traditional testing tools and methods in an agile project. Testing with traditional tools will become the weakest link and likely drag down the team velocity. The cornerstone of Agile testing is quicker, iterative deliveries which can only happen when testing can be done on demand within the same sprint.
What is difference between agile testing and manual testing?
The comparison of agile with manual testing cannot be done. It will be a case of comparing apples with oranges. Manual testing is any testing that is done predominantly with manual efforts. Agile testing also has need for doing manual testing in an exploratory manner during the sprints. Traditionally waterfall-based projects use a phased testing approach. It involves a top-down method, wherein testing is conducted step-by-step. Long durations of such project allow testing to be done manually and at the fag end. Agile projects, on the other hand, follows a more iterative and adaptive paradigm with stages such as project planning, risk management, design and development, and testing happening continually.
How is testing different in agile methodologies than in conventional plan driven approaches?
The fundamental difference between traditional and agile methodologies is the sequencing of project phases — requirements collecting, planning, design, development, testing and UAT. In traditional development approaches, the sequence of the phases in which the project is developed is linear whereas in Agile, it is iterative.
What is Agile testing in QA and when should QA be involved in agile?
Agile QA testing methodology is aimed at bringing the ideas of agile software development to the QA testing process. Agile testing highlights the iterative nature of agile and CI/CD development cycles and strives to synchronize QA with the cadence of releases.
“Test Early and Test Often” is the mantra agile testing advocates. The agile testing model seeks to incorporate QA at each stage of the project’s lifecycle to detect issues as early as possible. Within each sprint, QA engineers test and retest the product whenever a new feature gets added or existing functionality gets changed.
What are the basic principles of Agile Testing?
Keeping in line with the ethos of Agile development, there are a number of principles that drive agile testing, namely:
- Continuous collaboration between agile testers and rest of the team
- Enabling incremental deliveries of high-quality software to the client.
- Encouraging open communication in place of extensive documentation.
- Empowerment to raise issues regarding the quality of the application.
- Enabling continuous improvement.
- Respond fast to change – be it changing requirements or any other factors.
- Emphasis on self-organization rather than instruction driven management.
What are the key issues or challenges in Agile Testing?
Agile testing is markedly different from traditional waterfall testing. The significant challenges in agile testing are:
- Lesser availability of documentation. Agile stresses more on communication and collaboration rather than extensive documentation. Agile testers have to constantly be communicating with developers in understanding features, changes and specifications.
- Frequent Testing is a mandatory requirement in agile projects. With its emphasis on automation, the agile testers need to continually test the software, adopt shift left testing and use automation heavily for regression.
- Repetitive Regression Testing Cycles are a must. With Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD) being adopted overwhelmingly in agile projects, ensuring trigger-based execution of automation is a key challenge. The test automation infrastructure has to be fast in execution and quick in making changes to failing scripts.
- The fast and continually changing landscape in agile projects presents a challenge in monitoring the state of the software quality. Gathering metrics which are relevant and improvement driven becomes a challenge.
- Frequently changing requirements have the power to handicap the software testing efforts. Even minor changes being made to the application can cripple significant chunk of the automation scripts making them broken. Fixing broken scripts will then require additional time and efforts.
Do we write test cases in agile?
Yes, in agile we do require test cases. Based on stories, test scenarios have to be generated, and based on test scenarios, test cases are to be created. It is a wrong notion to think that no test cases need to be written in agile testing projects. You need to have minimal documentation that provides information on what testing has been done, what testing has been excluded, which test scenarios have been considered and what kind of test coverage is present for the different features.
What is DevOps in testing? Can DevOps and Agile operate together?
DevOps is all about optimizing and automating your whole software delivery lifecycle. For most organizations, a successful DevOps testing plan starts with embracing the agile best practice of Continuous Integration (CI), where developers check code into a shared repository numerous time a day.
Both DevOps and agile give a structure and framework that helps expedite software delivery. You do not need to pick between DevOps or agile—instead, you may make advantage of both techniques.
Is DevOps better and useful for testers than Agile?
DevOps strategy emphasizes the usage of automation for testing which assists the developers and testers in launching a new feature quickly. Quick delivery also helps in client happiness. DevOps encourages a completely automated continuous integration and deployment pipeline to enable frequent releases, whereas Agile gives the capacity to rapidly adapt to the changing requirements and greater communication between diverse smaller teams.
Who tests in DevOps?
DevOps takes the Agile approach a step further by bringing closer the release and deployment activities to those of development and testing. This means that an agile team on its own is responsible for the creation, testing and release of the software they build.
What is an Agile testing life cycle?
Agile is an iterative development technique, where both development and testing operations are concurrent. Testing is not a separate process. Coding and Testing are done interactively and gradually, resulting in quality end product, which the meets customer expectations.
Agile testing strategy comprises forms of testing done in that iteration like test data requirements, infrastructure, test environments, and test results. Unlike the waterfall model, with an agile model, a test plan is prepared and modified for every release. Typical test plans in agile includes:
- Testing Scope
- New functionalities which are being tested
- Level or Types of testing dependent on the features complexity
- Load and Performance Testing
- Infrastructure Consideration
- Mitigation or Risks Plan
- Resourcing
- Deliverables and Milestones
What are the QA issues with agile software development?
- New features are provided quickly, which limits the available time for test teams to identify whether the latest features are according to the need and does it actually answer the business suits.
- Testers are often needed to play a quasi-developer role.
- Test execution cycles are greatly compressed.
- Very less time to prepare test plan; lack of detailed documentation.
- Limited time availability for regression testing.
- Requirement changes and updates are inherent in an agile technique, proving the biggest challenge for QA.
Conclusion
Agile methodology in software testing entails testing as early as possible in the software development lifecycle. It demands substantial client interaction and frequent testing of code as soon as it becomes available. Extensive regression testing has to be done to make sure that the bugs are addressed and tested and no new regression issues exist. Using traditional technique and tools will make testing the slowest activity. Fanatiqa can help here. Fanatiqa is designed from the ground up to be an agile functional testing platform that helps teams become truly agile and do their functional testing in the fastest and most comprehensive manner, in step with the development. Fanatiqa helps you in doing true agile test automation. Fanatiqa not only allows you to execute test cases on multiple browsers, it also designs and creates them. Talk to us experience a better way of agile functional testing.