Companies are moving to agile. However, it is important to understand its core concepts. This project management method is characterized by great communication, feedback, adapting to change, and achieving great work results.
Agile is usually iterative because it is done in short sprints. Each sprint builds on the previous one. There are some processes that a company must follow before it can fully embrace agile.
This article will discuss agile automated testing and its methods. We also share some best practices in order to provide you with additional information. We hope you’ll be able to understand agile automation testing by the end.
What is Agile Automation?
Agile automation testing, as the name implies, is an approach to using automated test methods in agile processes. This is a process that occurs in software development. Its main purpose is to ensure that software development is efficient and effective without compromising quality, time and resource consumption.
Collaboration and intense coordination are required for agile automation testing. Automation testing’s main purpose is to reduce time and costs. It doesn’t find new or innovative defects like some people expect, but it confirms what is there.
Let’s now look at some methods to help you get an understanding of agile automation testing.
Methods
1. Exploratory Testing
This is a cyclical process that begins with the test design and continues through test execution, analysis, and learning. The tests are not scripted, but created by Agile testers during product exploration. This requires testers to draw on their unique skill set before the process begins again.
This helps testers determine if the software is actually working. This method can identify bugs that are difficult to find using other testing methods.
2. Session-Based Testing
This test method enhances and refines exploratory tests. It remedies the strength-cum-weakness of exploratory testing, which stems from the creativity of those who do it by adding structure. A charter is often created before a test session begins.
The testing sessions are uninterrupted and mainly focus on one charter. After the test is completed, the entire session is reviewed and reported to the manager. This ensures that all areas are thoroughly tested and there are no backlogs.
3. Acceptance Test-Driven Design
This form of test-driven testing takes into consideration the team nature of agile development. This union is between developers and customers to ensure acceptance tests reflect the customer’s wishes.
After this, the functionality needed to create it is created. This allows developers to create test cases easily by letting customers know what they need and providing information about the product’s intended purpose. This eliminates uncertainty and helps to avoid big mistakes.
4. Behavior-driven Development
This approach draws on test-driven design and enhances acceptance of test-driven. These two methods are combined to determine the best business outcomes. These results are used to determine the correct business outcomes.
Best Practices
Automation testing is an integral part of the application development process. Automation testing can be a challenge. If not done correctly, this could lead to application failure.
This article will discuss seven best practices that can help you ensure your automation testing is more efficient depending on your agile development approach.
1. Parallel testing is a must
People don’t get the desired results from agile automation testing because agile development is focused on continuous delivery with a few short iterations within the development and/or deployment pipeline. Therefore, quality assurance teams are often short-staffed, even though they go through many regression testing sprints.
Because these are small testing cycles, testers have to face challenges finding, fixing, testing each iteration’s products. This means that testing must be done in sufficient time, including automation testing.
Parallel testing is a way for an organization to achieve this. It basically involves running multiple test threads simultaneously. Parallel testing is a way to reduce test time, automate processes, and increase the productivity of agile teams.
Parallel testing allows testers to spend more time on explanatory testing or debugging issues.
2. Make Sure You Have Quality Tests
It is important to create robust and high-quality tests. Regression testing should be easy to integrate with agile testers. These scripts can be scripted or not. But they must be flexible enough. They can adapt to the long-term needs of regression testing.
The tests should be accurate, maintainable, integrity, portability and portability. These six criteria will allow testers to perform automatic regression testing with ease, precision, and high quality without any human input.
A solid and consistent test script eliminates the need for making unnecessary modifications in order to complete regression testing.
3. Select Your Automation Tool Carefully
This is often the most difficult task before you start automation testing. How do you select the right automation tool? How do you make sure that the automation tool you choose is right? These are just a few of the questions you need to ask.
To avoid wasting time and money, you need to spend some time evaluating the capabilities of your test tool. You need to ensure that the tool you choose not only meets your requirements, but that it also automates your tests.
No matter what type of test you are performing, there are certain features and functions that all tools should have. These are:
- Your automation tool must be OS-friendly. You should ensure that your automation tool supports all operating systems.
- You must meet all requirements of the testing team. Otherwise, your testing won’t be as smooth.
- It is important that the tool you choose has an easy-to-use interface. This will make it easy for beginners to use.
- It should be compatible with a variety of browsers. This will allow you to quickly test the compatibility of your web app across different browsers.
- Regression testing should be seamless.
- It should be within your budget and provide value for money.
- Finally, ensure that you have integrated support and cross-functional tools in your tool choice. These tools should include cross delivery, bug tracking and test management tools.
4. Automation is a Part of Development
Automation testing should be considered part of development. This should be considered a core part of agile development. This will make testing more efficient. But, be aware that you shouldn’t fall into these traps.
- You shouldn’t try to automate all tests or implement automation for every feature. Automation that isn’t best for the task will have an adverse effect on your workflow.
Once you have implemented a feature, automation should be used to reflect the changes. Automation can be used to detect reflected changes after you have implemented a new feature.
- Don’t try to cover 100% of the code, it is impossible. Manual or automated testing cannot cover all of the software code. Even if you try to cover all the code, that does not guarantee the quality of your test. Therefore, we recommend that you use one-to-one translations for automation testing. This will only give you a partial coverage of the application. It is impossible to automate it all.
These two scenarios will determine which approach is best. The best way to test automation is to keep the test case size small and manageable. These tests are often difficult to perform, but they allow you to make quick changes to meet the regression requirements.
This will reduce the need to maintain large test suites that contain multiple scenarios, codes, or configurations. A large portion of the development load will be reduced if there are fewer test cases.
5. Make sure you have a complete view of the testing process
Different roles are involved in product development. These include the project stakeholders and managers as well as several other members of the project team. Testing should not be limited to quality assurance and testers. It should include everyone on the project team.
All members of the project should have access to the automation process and be able to see the results. Each member should be able to give their opinion on the trends, code quality and statistics used in the testing process. These will assist in the implementation and expansion of automation.
The ability to make the results visible will encourage positive perspectives, which will lead to the regular updating of test scripts and improve collaboration. This is what you want.
6. Monitor the Development Environment
It is a good idea to keep an eye on both the development environment and the developers. It is a good idea to monitor both the developers and the development environment continuously.
A bug can also be caused by other sources than the application. It could be caused by configurations or bad networks between devices.
Therefore, the testing team needs to understand how the environment for product development works. This knowledge will be very useful as it allows the team to focus on the quality of the product and not just the origin of the bug.
This best practice in agile testing of automation requires that everyone be alert for potential issues and have everything in place so that automated test can be as effective and efficient in agile development.
7. Make sure you perform cross-browser and cross-platform testing as soon as possible during the initial stages.
Due to the increased traffic, cross-browser support is very important in the later stages of agile development. In the initial stages of agile development, it is reasonable to expect little traffic from all browsers. To avoid the time and resource intensive later stages, it is important to make the product compatible across browsers in the early stages.
Cross-browser testing is a must for any application. A testing infrastructure can be expensive for a startup. In such cases, it is possible to leverage the cloud. You can use multiple browsers to run your tests and you have a scalable cloud infrastructure that doesn’t require any maintenance, scaling or development.
8. Integrate DevOps to Leverage
DevOps is a useful tool for agile development because it integrates development, testing and operations. DevOps is an essential tool for agile development teams. It also offers many benefits, such as cross-functional collaboration and team collaboration, which are vital for rapid feature development and continuous software engineering.
DevOps recognizes shared working environments. This means that automated testing, code integration, and development can all happen simultaneously in real time. This results in a more efficient development cycle.
These are the top practices every agile testing team should follow in agile automation testing.
Conclusion
This article has covered everything you need to know about agile automation testing. We hope you will follow the best practices discussed to get the results you want.