In today’s world of software development, the latest trend is focused towards achieve targets, customer satisfaction and excellent quality within a restricted time frame. The main reason behind this is that the business scenario in today’s time is quite different from the past and a large number of product development companies have now adopted a new concept known as ‘Agile Methodology’, especially in their Software Development Life Cycles. Due to the rising popularity of this method, it is also a commonly asked testing interview question for most IT related jobs these days.
Introduction to Agile Testing
When any application being testing is still under the process of evolving, it can be extremely impractical to go for normal standard SDLC models such as V&V model, Water Fall etc. These kinds of models usually work with non-volatile and stable applications. The concept known as ‘Time-To-Market’ is considered to be the key in current IT scenario and it encourages vendors to introduce new strategies for saving time, reducing cost and saving resources while delivering a high quality and reliable product that meets all the requirements of the user. To make this possible, a huge amount of end-to-end testing is required. The adoption of this systematic methodology in testing is made possible due to the newly introduced concept of Agile Methodology. This methodology strivers continually to overall all issues in a dynamic environment while maintain the pre-defined process.
The Process of Using Agile Methodology in Testing
The process of using agile methodology in testing progresses as follows:
1. The customer outlines the requirements of the business, which is then reviewed by the engineering team or the business analyst. Ideally, the testing team is also involved in this review to successfully progress on the further stages.
2. In the design and implementation stage, the different issues are analyzed at different stages of the process and the user stories are documented by the engineering team. This is reviewed by customer on periodic basis and accordingly the requirements are updated. The testing team follows up regularly till a consolidated document is prepared. This helps in ensuring that the customer, the testing team as well as the engineering team are on the same page at all times during the process.
3. After this, the engineering team begins the implementation process and the testing team begins the planning for the testing by developing test cases and test strategies. All these documentations are then handed over to engineering team for their review as well as to the customer. This is required to ensure complete test coverage as well as to avoid redundant and unnecessary test cases.
4. Once the code is implemented by the developed, it is the job of the testing test to identify whether the application can be developed using this code through quick testing. This helps in identifying any defects that may have occurred during the early stages of the development process so that they can be fixed on a priority basis in the next round and further development can be carried on. This iterating continues till the very end of the code implementation process. Once testing begins, the team can focus on other important testing items including Integration, System Testing and Usability Testing.
This is the basic process of testing used in the Agile Methodology for detecting errors at each stage of the development process.