Six Tips to Hitting Sixes with Agile Testing!

The current business environment is very customer centric, rendering it to an extremely fluid character. Business demands keep on changing as per the trends and the customer behavior.

Keeping this fluidity in mind, organizations today are becoming  increasingly flexible, transparent and ‘agile'. Even as software  development practices continue to evolve, it has become increasingly important to test and modify software from the perspective of the group that will ultimately decide the fate of an organization's business  --their customers. With the consumers who decide this continuity or end, ‘Agile' methods are a development  approach taken up with agility!

Traditionally, quality assurance teams have lacked visibility into what is being tested, the actual test results, the business requirements driving testing and the extent  to which they are reflected in the testing requirements.  The movement toward agile adoption promotes environments where organizations can deliver and benefit from  real-time visibility into testing activities and the quality status of a project. Here, we have pulled together six  practical tips for developers on how they can optimize their  software testing procedures.

1. Test early and often

Not just some, but all relevant test procedures for a given project must be carried out comprehensively as early  as possible in the lifecycle of a project. By doing this,  problems can be identified early and can be rectified  before they become roadblocks capable of stalling the  entire project.

2. Integrate your unit testing

Unit testing is a critical step in the development process that helps developers ensure that the code being used will  actually do what it is designed to do and will behave in the

way it is intended. As a foundational step of the process,  unit testing must be integrated into the test management  environment.

3. Load test daily

As more and more software is designed for massively scalable deployments, load testing has emerged as an  important step in the development process. The best  product in the world will be useless if it crashes under  the weight of too many users. Simple load tests should  be incorporated into the daily software build in order to  identify performance problems as early as possible.

4. Automate your testing

Manual testing can be a tedious, time-consuming and inefficient process that not only waste time and resources,  but is also more prone to error. Early test automation in the

development process will lead to greater test efficiency and  eliminate the inaccuracies of manual processes. 

5. Know your start points

Test starting points must be clearly defined throughout the testing process, so it is important to take starting points into  consideration even in the development stage. For example,  developers and testers can attach ‘testability hooks' to  existing interfaces, or they can add attributes that can be  used for the test procedure.

6. Don't be too rigid

One of the primary benefits to agile testing is the flexibility it delivers to the development teams. Software development  projects are not static -priorities, goals and requirements

can be fluid and often change throughout the development  lifecycle. Regular, scheduled assessment of test exercises  priorities during the course of the project can ensure that

the team is always testing against the most up to date set of  requirements and living up to the flexible environment that  Agile development was designed to foster.