Automation, as we know, comes with numerous advantages of increased productivity and reduced costs. Meanwhile, there have been continuous technological developments in the software industry. Automation is an addition to agile testing methodologies that cannot be replaced with other solutions. In order to amp up the software testing process, organizations need to utilize automation testing to release faster and quality software products. An automation testing company implies automation and removes the need for manual testing for repetitive and time-consuming tasks, so that manual testers can focus on other areas of software quality assurance. Since test automation for agile products, it should start parallel to the development process so that this time can be utilized for testing. Test automation should be a well-planned strategy to prove as a cost-solutions and achieve the desired results. Building in an agile environment provides you with endless programming options down the road.
Before the Advent of Agile Testing
The water development approach was extensively used before the advent of agile software development solutions. The traditional development model includes a systematic approach that begins with planning, designing, development, and software testing. A prominent feature of this approach is that the next phase is executed only once the previous phase is completed. So, software testing came at the end of the development process. However, if a user has added new requirements at the end of the process, then the application had to be re-developed with new requirements. Or if testers identify a bug, then they had to repeat the whole process to locate the area where the bug was introduced. In addition, it was possible to deploy a product only once it is completely built.
What is Agile Software Development and Testing?
In an agile environment, development and testing processes are performed in several iterations. Continuous Integration (CI), and Continuous Deployment (CD) approaches are used in agile environments. CD is only possible if a product is continuously tested as well. However, in a software development cycle, the development process is faster and testers are unable to cope up with the speed of their testing, then switching to agile methodology may be a wrong choice to make. QA teams cannot implement agile solutions with slow testing processes. Thus, they need to pace up their speed and ensure that CI and CD approaches are performed effectively.
In an agile environment, testers need to come up with efficient testing methods to support faster deployment. Automation testing aims at speeding up testing processes with the use of software testing tools in an efficient manner. There are a number of tools available to automate testing methods like Selenium, Appium, Cucumber, and Test Studio. Testers need to develop test cases according to the apps under testing. They can run these tests multiple times while performing continuous builds. So, if a bug appears, it is easier to detect at which stage it was introduced in the app, and it can be addressed immediately.
Challenges faced by Testers in An Agile Environment
When moving from a traditional testing approach to agile, testers may face a number of challenges. A few of them are listed below, that can be addressed with the help of automation:
Early Detection of Bugs – It is easier to resolve bugs when they appear in the earlier stages of the development process. However, it becomes difficult and expensive to resolve them at the end. Testers can either conduct code reviews or run static analysis tools on the code. These automated tools are designed to identify missing routes, improve coding standards, and errors that are found in the production phase.
Insufficient Testing Coverage – Due to the continuous integration and changing requirements, testers often tend to miss critical tests. To ensure that all changed codes are tested, testers need to ensure a wide testing coverage with source code analysis to identify the changes that were made to the code.
Performance Issues – The complexity of code increases due to the addition of new features in an application. There are different performance issues that arise and developers lose their track of how the performance is affected. In order to address these issues, testers should use automated testing tools to identify the bottlenecks and work on improving performance.
Broken Code – Since code changes on a daily basis, the exiting features are affected greatly. To address this issue, each time changes are made to the code, it needs to be tested. Testers can implement automation testing to perform this difficult task.
Automation testing has become the backbone of the agile development approach. Thus, an automation testing company can help agile testers to keep their pace to meet demands for faster releases.
