Importance of Agile Testing in Application Development

Agile Methodology is a practice which helps promote iteration of development throughout the development life cycle of the particular project. When compared to waterfall model, agile testing is concurrent in both development and testing abilities.

What Is Agile Testing?

Agile testing is all about changes and making differences in requirements even in the future with later on better development phases. It is very important to understand the basics of Agile methodology.

The main objective of Agile testing is to deliver the product with minimal functionalities to the client itself. These only happen when you have adapted to agile development fully.

Agile testing is a continuous process normally and is done in multiple phases. With every new delivery adds more features ,smoother functions and more capabilities added on to the product. This method results in higher customer satisfaction.

When a testing team uses Agile methodology the test does not finish in just one phase it is done in various intervals. Testing it earlier ensured minimal damage and risk in the end application.

There are various advantages of Agile testing some of them are below:

Applications with minimal functionalities are ready faster and hence satisfying the customer/client.

Testing is a process which ensures that the product will meet all the requirements in each iteration as there is sign of progress.

The process of testing is conducted by the entire team and not by testers.

Instead of test documentation there are lightweight documents and checklist suffices.

The developers and testers only consider the application complete once the tests are implemented and tested.

With advantages come disadvantages. There are some of the disadvantages which you shouldn’t over look.

Disadvantages:

The whole test team may not work on developing a consistent and powerful test system that can be maintained for years.

Bug fixes and releases happen more often and more of the number in regression bugs increase.

The team need to turn around quickly and hence robbing some time k to work on detailed documentation like test strategies.

Agile testing methodology poses some of the challenges. Testers should possess full functionality and in-depth knowledge of the application which is under test. Agile method proposes an incremental and iteration approach to software designing. With the help of Agile testing, errors can be fixed even in the middle of the ongoing project. At the end every sprint, user acceptance is performed. Agile testing enables all the testers’ ad developers to work together and hence boosting that performance. This requires close communication with the developers and together they can analyses all the requirements and planning of the particular project allotted to them.

Ever since the Agile methodology came up with its founder willing to do with laborious realities of the traditional waterfall model.

Automation tool selection plays a very big role in agile testing. The selection of relevant automation tools are very potentially important factor. Licensed tools are very important. For example it imposes strict security access to different types and standards users, especially when it comes to accessing various resources.

The primary attention of the process should be on ensuring whether the order obtains the quality delivery of automation test scripts within the given time and as afforded by agile methodology.

Important metrics that can be obtained for usage of Agile are:

Efforts in hours which cannot contribute to a goal

Drag factor can be improved by reducing the number of resources shared and by reducing through amount of work

Estimates can be increased by percentage of drag factor

Amount of backlog can be converted to shippable functionality of sprint.

Number of units’ tests are added.

Time taken to complete the particular build allotted.

Various types of bugs which are detected in iteration or maybe in the previous ones.

In contrast the Agile methodology emphasis upon the open collaboration and open ended interaction between team members thus restrictive policies which affects users and can have negative impact on the overall cohesion within the team and hence results in a very bad environment within the work space.

One of the main objective of the process should be to ensure that in order to maintain the quality delivery of the test scripts it should be automated in a more standard and disciplinary way.

About Author: Sangram is a tech enthusiast, presently working as a Content Expert with Crestech software systems. Tech blogging is his passion, through which he intends to explore the world of software Testing. He doesn’t just write for tech-savvy people, but also for those who find the world of technology intriguing.