8 Tips to Be More Effective in Agile Software Testing

8 Tips to Be More Effective in Agile Software Testing
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Agile testing has become an essential part of application development lifecycles and has had a major impact on software development, its testing and quality assurance.

Additionally, it has been widely recognized as a critical element in the production of high-quality products.

Many organizations are moving towards agile software development with the help of custom software developers as development is fast and code releases happen more quickly.

In agile, when a project starts multiple development teams work simultaneously to deliver the product.

In such an environment it is very important that testing happens accurately and the code without any bugs is released in the live environment.

Before we discuss the tips that can make testing more effective in agile software testing; let us talk and understand more about agile methodology.

What is Agile Methodology?

Agile Methodology

In agile, the complete requirement is not defined at the project starts. The requirements evolve as different self-organized, cross-functional teams work on different parts of the project.

What is Agile Testing?

Agile testing is testing the product from the customer’s perspective as early as possible. In agile testing, you can start the testing process as soon as the stable code is available to you for unit-level testing.

You should be able to incorporate new modules in the testing process as they become available. 

In the traditional method, the testing process starts only when the complete product is ready. Hence, both the methods are very different.

Can the Tester Start the Testing Process Before Development?

Yes, they can, and they should. In fact, the tester can start with the preparation of the test environment and the data setup that will be required for the testing even before a single line of code is written.

It saves a lot of time, and the testing team can take in new components much faster and test them. As an agile tester or testing team, you need to ensure you have all the necessary tools to do testing. 

Here Are Some Tips to Be More Effective in Agile Testing:

Agile Testing

Get the Mindset of An Agile Tester

There are a few character traits and a specific mindset the agile tester should have. Agile is different from waterfall testing, the piece of code keeps coming, and you will have to test the piece of the code while keeping the broader picture of the project at the back of your mind.

An agile tester should also have soft management skills and should be good at communication.

He should understand the project requirement clearly. Then he should be capable of breaking it down into smaller test cases before the testing process starts.

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If there are any questions around any test cases, he should be prompt to get back to the product owner or development team for clarification.

Understand the Business Objectives

Don’t think of yourself as a tester. Think of yourself as the end-user of the product. The tester should have a 100 percent understanding of what the product does.

He should know what the end-user is going to do with the product. Based on the analysis and understanding, the tester should focus on parts of the application that the end-user is most likely to use.

They should have separate strategies for product architecture and end-users. As a tester, if you think certain features are slow or the end-user may not like using it the way it is presented, you should raise that immediately with the product owner.

At the end of the day, you have to meet the user requirement as a team. 

Understand the Data Flow

The agile tester should understand the impact of data flow in the application. How the data flow will impact each component and what kind of data can cause component failure. In agile, mostly only a few components get tested at once.

However, the agile tester should take into consideration the impact when data flows end-to-end. The tester should ensure every component will be able to accept the data coming from outside.

Automated Testing

Automated Testing

Automation is the future, and most businesses are focusing on it. With the advancement of technology, it is possible to not only write unit tests but also automate tests against a user interface.

Testing automation identifies the problem very early in the product development cycle, and hence the integration later becomes simpler.

You should try to focus on automation – as the number of components increases and the project gets to the completion stage, you don’t have to retest every single component manually. Automation will save a lot of time for you in agile.

Use Risk-Based Testing

As mentioned above, the testing efforts increase as more and more components start coming in. Every component will have hundreds of validation and features to test.

You cannot retest every feature at every integration step. You will have to take a risk-based testing approach. In this approach, you determine which features you are going to test during the testing phase.

The risk level has to be determined by the teams and the customers, and you should be 100% transparent in communicating whatever you are going to test.

If they want you to test more functions at every step, you should ask for more time from the product owner.

Create Quality Metrics and Share the Same with Everyone

Quality Metrics

You should raise the defect in the system immediately for all the issues. Also, you should ensure all the open issues and action items for each issue are made public. 

All the concerned parties like the development team, tester, and test manager, product owner, and architect should know the open items.

Also, they should know which team is going to work on it. In agile, the development team can make changes in the code immediately and send the code back for testing.

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Hence, it is important, the action items are tagged immediately and worked upon. As an agile tester, you should be prompt in doing your part.

Understand the Issue by Checking Logs

As an agile tester, you should not just raise an issue. You should be able to check the logs and point out which component is causing the discrepancies in the actual result and the expected result.

You should be highly focused on capturing the silent errors. Silent errors are those that escape the low-level error detection.

Such errors are not mostly detected when the developer is doing unit-level testing for his code. You should go through the logs carefully and not miss even a single line in a log while validation.

Test Early, Test Often and Continuously

Test

As mentioned above, you should start the testing process as soon as possible. You should adopt exploratory testing (ET). In this approach, the testing is instantaneous.

It is one of the essential aspects of agile project testing. For the proper and timely delivery of products, you should start testing early, test as often as required, and test continuously.

You should have unit, integration, functional, and load testing as part of your testing plan. Not a tip but important – Start doing it.

You should try to adopt as many tips as possible from the above list we have discussed. The sooner you start using the above tips, the faster you will improve as a tester or testing team.

Conclusion

In agile software development, the development stages are very important. The focus is not just on the end product but on every single feature or component of the product.

Hence, testing is an integral part of the process. In agile, the testing team has a real-time view of the requirement and the test cases.

Testers should make use of the tips discussed above and deliver the best products to the end-users.