Software development is a complex process. Even in the early days of software development as a discipline, architects realized that without a governance structure, this process becomes chaos. This is how software development lifecycles entered the world, from waterfall to Agile.
When we talk about mobile and web projects, most of which are built using some form of Agile (or agile) development methodology, and all parts of the software development lifecycle, be it development, deployment or even testing - everything is governed by the same the same principles of fast time-to-market.
When we talk about software development, we simply cannot overlook testing as it is a critical part of the development process. Agile techniques make it easier to spot bugs early in the cycle, allowing developers to quickly fix bugs. But testing later in software development often requires retests for specific scenarios.
In every Agile sprint, developers are tasked with creating a number of new features, while testers have to test the entire application. This involves testing not only the new features, but all the old ones as well, to make sure the new iteration of development doesn't ruin the old product.
In such circumstances, manual testing quickly becomes a slower and more stressful option. Teams start to cut corners to save time and product quality drops. This is how enterprises with agile development approaches come to automated testing - to cope with continuous development and deployment.
Today we will talk about seven different ways to improve the effectiveness of test automation in Agile development. But before that, it's important for us to understand why automated testing is vital to Agile development.
Why Automate Agile Development?
Agile is used to create high quality software products while reducing the risk associated with long time to market. Now that continuous product changes are part of any typical agile model, having a test automation process is critical to ensure that the highest possible quality is delivered every time a product is shipped.
In addition to retesting, there are various Agile QA issues that can only be encountered in automated testing, since agile development relies on the integration and continuous analysis of the software product you create. Some of these problems are:
Broken code due to frequent builds
Code changes in Agile development are very common and often lead to code glitches, especially during integration. Continuous integration and continuous deployment imply continuous testing. Implementing automated testing with your CI / CD pipelines will make it easy to deal with this situation.
Wrong test coverage
In the later stages of Agile development sprints, when the number of features grows exponentially, you will have less and less time to test all these new features in the same limited time. This means that you will have to test some of your user stories in the hope that they weren't patched in the latest release. But with automatic regression testing, when you have automated testing of all legacy features, you can be confident in the reliability of the functionality and guaranteed quality every release.
Performance bottlenecks
When we try to improve the functionality of a web application, we end up complicating it. In addition, application performance suffers due to the large amount of code. Thus, automated load testing tools can be useful in identifying Bottlenecks when monitoring the performance of your web application.
Insufficient API testing
Implementing complex APIs in a web application often makes it more complex, and we often overlook API testing in such scenarios. With test automation tools like LambdaTest, you can quickly resolve these issues.
Complexity of testing on mobile devices
Over the past few years, there has been a significant increase in mobile devices. More and more devices enter the market every day, which makes testing for each individual device nearly impossible. With a robust and powerful suite of test automation tools, you can be sure your code is bug-free with every new build.
Benefits of Using Test Automation in Agile Development
Test automation benefits Agile development in several ways, such as speed, performance, reliability, programmability, reusability, and more. Some of the significant benefits of automated testing in Agile development include:
Speed up test execution
Agile test automation enables continuous integration, which can help the QA team get started testing faster.
Guaranteed quality
Using a well-proven and reliable test automation tool, you can ensure the quality of your web application at any time.
Repeated execution
If certain test cases for your application run continuously, then with the right approach and automation tool, you can easily get your build to run every day.
Improving the quality of communication and collaboration
The automation tool not only improves product quality, but also improves communication and collaboration between teams by allowing them to share the testing process with each other.
Now that you understand the importance of test automation in Agile development, it is vital to understand the best practices that will make it effective for Agile.
Ways to Improve the Efficiency of Test Automation in Agile Development
There is no doubt that automated testing helps in the application development lifecycle. But there are also some tricky automated testing issues that can crash your application if you don't implement testing properly. Below, we've covered seven different ways to help make automated testing more effective as part of your Agile development approach.
1. Conducting parallel testing
One of the main reasons for not achieving the desired results in agile testing with automation is that agile development is continuous delivery with several short iterations in the development and deployment pipeline. Because of this, QA teams often run short and frequent regression testing sprints. These small test cycles mean that it is now more difficult for testers to find, fix, and test products with each iteration.
Thus, it is important to set aside sufficient time for both testing and testing automation. The first step in reducing testing time is to start running parallel testing, that is, running multiple test threads at the same time. Parallel testingwill not only improve the automation process, but also increase the productivity of the team. It will even allow your testers to take the time to target testing and actually debug existing problems.
2. Development of quality tests
Another important factor to consider is creating reliable tests. Testers need to develop quality test cases that can be easily integrated with regression testing. Whether scripted or not scripted, test scripts must be flexible enough to cater to the long-term requirements of regression testing and must meet the following criteria:
- Accuracy.
- Serviceability.
- Portability.
- Integrity.
- Versioning.
- Performance.
The main goal of following these criteria is to perform accurate, easy, and high-throughput automated regression testing without human intervention. If the test cases are consistent and reliable, the QA can quickly complete regression testing without unnecessary changes.
3. DevOps integration
DevOps is known as the convergence of development, test and operations roles, making it essential for the Agile development team. DevOps offers significant benefits, such as collaboration and collaboration by the same team, which is critical to rapid feature development and a seamless software development process.
In addition, because DevOps supports a common work environment, development, code integration, and automated testing happen in real time, which enables a more efficient Agile development lifecycle.
4. Choose your automation tool wisely
Choosing a test automation tool is one of the toughest challenges, because if you don't take the time to evaluate the capabilities of your automation tool, you may end up wasting your time and money. When you are looking for an automation tool, make sure it meets your testing requirements and will accurately ensure the success of your automation efforts.
To make it easier for you to find automation tools, we've listed several features and capabilities that every automation tool should have, no matter what type of testing you're doing.
- First of all, an automation tool must be OS compatible, which means that it must support almost all operating systems that users use to access your web application.
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When working with Agile approaches, it is recommended to consider automation as an integral part of Agile development. This way, you can make the whole testing process more efficient. According to most testers, there are two main pitfalls in agile automated testing that you should avoid:
- Automation doesn't make sense if you're trying to automate every test or use automation for every feature supplied. This is the wrong approach to using automation. In fact, you should use automation for reflected changes that occur after the introduction of a new feature or in the case of regression testing when you need to rerun the tests.
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One of the best approaches to more efficient automated testing in Agile development is to keep test cases small and compact. Small test cases are not only easy to execute, they also allow you to quickly make changes to meet the requirements of the regression.
It also reduces the need to maintain large test suites that contain a lot of code, scripts, and configurations. Almost all of the burden on the development process is reduced by reducing the size of test cases.
6. Cross-browser testing and cross-platform testing from the very start
Although you will receive very limited traffic from niche browsers in the early stages of a product launch, however, in the later stages, as you get more traffic, cross-browser support will start to come out more and more.
Ensuring cross-browser or cross-platform compatibility of an entire product at a later stage is very resource-intensive and time-consuming. Perform cross-browser testing of your application from day one.
If you say that investing in a testing infrastructure will be very costly for a startup, I'll be the first to agree with you. An internal testing infrastructure means you have to buy a Mac computer, Windows computer, Android devices, iOS devices, etc., and so on. The cost runs into thousands of dollars.
But this is where the whole power of the cloud manifests itself. You can take advantage of cross-browser testing platforms such as LambdaTest , Testingbot , Browserlingand so on to speed up testing. You get a huge list of browsers that you can run your tests on, as well as a scalable cloud infrastructure that you don't need to maintain, scale, or develop yourself.
7. Provide comprehensive transparency in the testing process
Product development often involves many stakeholders such as stakeholders, project managers, and so on, so the testing process should not be limited to testers and QA only. It is advisable to ensure the availability and simplicity of the automation process, as well as the availability of test automation results for all project participants. Getting feedback from other contributors on trends, statistics, and overall code quality improvements during testing can go a long way toward implementing better automation.
Making your test automation data visible to resources will help shape a positive point of view in itself, which in turn makes it easier to periodically update test scripts and promises a collaborative effort through mutual collaboration.
8. Constant monitoring of the development environment
It's always a good idea to keep track of the developers and development environment constantly. The software development process includes a network from back-end systems architecture to front-end interactions such as virtual machines, cloud modeling, and an external database.
The error doesn't always have to come from the application; sometimes this can be due to any form of network problem between devices, development environment, configurations, etc.
Therefore, it is very important to understand the functionality of all environments associated with your product development. This will help your testing team focus on product quality rather than looking at the root cause of the error in different data. Having everything you need and attention to processes always makes test automation more efficient and effective in agile development.
These are just a few techniques or tips that you can follow to make agile testing automation more effective. And if you are implementing automated testing for the first time in Agile development, then a cloud testing package - LambdaTest can help you.
Conclusion
Agile approaches are pushing companies to create better software development environments. Keeping pace with Agile development requires not only knowledge, but also resources to follow the latest trends and innovations in it, and automated testing is one of the core requirements of Agile development.
Here, we discussed how to make agile, automated testing more efficient using seven practical approaches. We hope this article will help you simplify the test automation process in Agile development.
