The world is witnessing the current popularity of agile methods in software development. Software testing also needs a new software testing method, which must be consistent with the rapid development of philosophical agile development. Test automation is not built to serve agile teams,
Software testing in agile teams
In recent years, agile methodologies have been so popular that they have dominated the software industry. Many product teams have transitioned from waterfall to agile to facilitate faster iterations in the software development life cycle. In agile methodologies, the development and testing processes are carried out in parallel, which puts higher demands on collaborative teams.
Agile projects require agile testing that follows all principles of practice. This is truly an irreplaceable part of agile software development. With this approach, quality inspection teams start testing at an earlier stage and continue testing the entire process without waiting for final testing.
By taking the initiative of agile testing, agile enables quality assurance teams to access more software modules and smaller implementation details, allowing more units to be tested at more levels to verify compliance with design requirements.
The importance of automated testing for Agile teams
Challenges of Agile software testing
Agile methodologies are the fastest way to turn requirements and ideas into reality, especially for dynamic projects that are constantly changing. However, the transition to agile is challenging. Its greatest advantage (the ability to iterate continuously) is the source of many major obstacles:
Frequent builds and deployments
The essence of agile methodologies is to adapt to constant change. With each update, both the code-based layer and the GUI layer of the application must be tested to ensure that they work properly when new changes are made. It results in a lot of regression testing work that needs to be done by the quality inspection team.
Finite time infinite range
Agile projects are usually broken down into small segments for teams to complete in 1-2 weeks. In such a short time, the quality inspection team had a lot of work to do to ensure the quality of the new release and the functionality of all the previous features. As software projects get bigger, the challenge gets worse.
The performance test
With each build, the product gets more features and improvements, resulting in a lot of added code. The structure of the application becomes more complex, while increasing the pressure on its performance. If the quality inspection team cannot perform all performance testing quickly, it is easy to run into performance bottlenecks after release, affecting the quality of software delivery.
More complex API testing
Modern software products, especially mobile applications, promise to meet the demands of intensive data exchange between different services. API testing must be performed throughout the process to ensure data integration. API Testing Basics
Automated testing
When dividing the scope of development into specific sprints, the quality team must always ensure that all of the developed functionality works in the current release. With such a large testing range, manual testing is a painful and undesirable option. In this case, automated testing ensures time efficiency of test execution and overall test quality.
Specifically, automated testing in agile methodologies helps:
Easy regression testing
Regression testing is the most important type of automated testing. By scripting all repetitive test cases to run automatically, testers can reduce the stress of manual execution to relieve them.
Extended test coverage
Another advantage of test automation for quality inspection teams is the ability to execute tests across browsers and platforms. As a result, the team can use the right automation tools to cover all possible testing aspects of the project based on the new changes. How do I choose an API test tool
Better collaboration
Collaborative teams are critical to every Agile project. As the quality inspection team becomes deeply involved at all stages of the SDLC, communication between developers and testers must be rapid to avoid falling behind in the constant updating. A useful automated testing tool provides teams with powerful reporting capabilities and strong integration with the CI/CD pipeline.
Implement test automation in agile teams
Test automation stands in stark contrast to agility: automated tests perform well on stable products, which are almost inherently variable. Therefore, it is important to understand how to automate within an Agile team before entering into Agile testing.
Planning and preparation
Agile projects can only succeed with agile teams. From the initial idea to the final build, quality assurance and development teams are critical to the success of the project. Both sides should actively and deeply cooperate.
Agile is a lean process that requires teams to accomplish all planned workloads in a short amount of time. Before starting a project, the automated test plan must be properly designed and built, including the automation framework needed if the team chooses to apply the open source tools.
Choose the correct automation scope
Not all test cases in agile projects are viable for automation. Due to large and frequent requirements changes, agile teams often modify their code on the fly to accommodate new requirements and changes. Test automation cannot handle such a fragile project, which is not only difficult to implement, but requires expensive script maintenance costs.
Regression testing is the best candidate for automation. Automation can reduce time for them by leveraging stable functionality from previous sprints while ensuring that functionality is not affected by new changes.
In addition, other desirable goals for quality inspection teams to automate in agile projects include APT tests, non-functional tests, and tests behind the GUI. In the face of changing requirements, these tests are stable enough for automated tools to perform at their best.
Parallel test
Since the entire Agile development process is about continuous delivery, parallel testing is the perfect combination of this approach and test automation. As a result, testing becomes an obstacle to the deployment process. With automation, the quality team can perform multiple tests simultaneously on different devices, browsers, and operating systems to ensure software compatibility and stability. This saves the team a lot of time, especially in the late sprint of the project. As a result, the team’s productivity and the quality of its tests are vastly improved.
Use the conversation
This part of the content said too much, you can refer to the previous article:
- How do YOU introduce automated testing in DevOps
- How do you implement continuous testing in DevOps
- How do YOU implement DevOps
- The conversation tool
- Test engineer in DevOps
Choose the right automation tool
As mentioned earlier, not all testing in Agile should be automated. However, the automated testing tool chosen for an Agile team should cover as much testing as possible. To this end, teams must consider some criteria when choosing an automation tool:
- The tool must support all operating systems on which the software is supposed to run.
- The tool supports a wide range of partitions and browsers to perform parallel testing;
- The tool’s learning curve should not take too long to get all members of the quality inspection team up to speed.
- The tool has powerful reporting and integration capabilities.
- In addition to these criteria, teams need to meet more requirements in order to choose the most appropriate automation tool for their projects.
Reference articles: – How to select automated test tools, how to select API test tools, how to select the right automated test tools.
conclusion
Content is the basis for all Agilists in their decision to automate tests. However, it is impossible to cover everything in this article. Each team needs to consider other elements of its agile automation test strategy to better take advantage of the benefits of this method lock.
FunTester.Tencent Cloud Author of the Year,Boss direct hire contract author.Official GDevOps media partner, non-famous test developer ER.
- Automated Testing trends in 2021
- Appium 2.0 quick reference
- FunTester test framework architecture diagram
- FunTester test project architecture diagram
- Verify depth copy from JVM heap memory analysis
- Single link performance test practice
- There are six steps to an automation strategy
- Handle request parameters in JMeter with Groovy
- Weak network test: what is the minimum fluent network speed?
- Performance test framework QPS sampler implementation