How Automated Testing Fits In Agile Testing Methodology?

A guide for helping the testers

Agile Testing

Agile Testing is not sequential but a continuous process. It starts with the inception of the project with continuous integration between development and testing!

What is Continuous Integration?

Software development practice which involves the various integrations of work done by the team resulting in multiple integrations per day. These integrations then get verified manually or via automation to detect any error.

How is Agile Testing different from other testing methods?

The technological world has various testing methods but here are some pointers that give the edge to Agile Testing:

1. Sprint Testing
2. Testing activities are at par with various other methodologies
3. Typical sprint task for the team
4. Equal responsibility of the team towards quality
5. Communication is maximum
6. Continuous feedback
7. To the programmers
8. To the developers

Testing Types Used in Agile

In Agile methodology there are different kinds of tests, we are laying out a few here:

1. Test planning
2. Acceptance testing
3. Functional testing
4. Regression testing
5. Demo testing
6. Test automation whenever possible

When to apply automated testing in Agile?

Automated testing in Agile must be applied where the test cases:

1. Are repeatable.
2. Are easy to see the expected result.
3. Are very tedious or difficult to perform manually
4. Run several times with different test data or conditions
5. Which are time-consuming
6. That are executed with different set of users
7. That get executed with various browsers and environments
8. Functions that are frequently used by many users
9. That have critical business functionality

Why is automated testing required?

Humans perform software tests whereas automation does not require human intervention.

An average tester has to sit in front of the computer and test the software based on types of usage and input combinations, comparing the results and making a record of the same.

An automated testing tool playbacks the pre-recorded and predefined actions. Compare the results as per the expected behavior and document any errors and report them to the tester.

Once created automated tests quickly repeat and extend themselves to perform tasks that seem impossible with manual testing.

Agile Tester faces many challenges, a few of which have been mentioned below. Efficient test automation helps mitigate these challenges. 

Poor Test Coverage: Code changes that were not expected beforehand lead to insufficient test coverage. It is refined gradually over sprints. Regression in automation can ensure that existing functionality is working as per requirement.

Broken Code: Due to the various integrations, the code is in the dynamic state, this raises the chances of getting broken code. This issue can be avoided or overcome with proper automation suite designed with continuous integration.

Insufficient API Testing: Developers must have strong coding skills for testing; automation testing tools make that part easy ensuring substantial testing of APIs.

Performance bottlenecks: More features means a complex set of codes. Adding more code lines without thinking about the end user results in performance issues. Automation tools help to detect performance issues and how the performance gets impacted over time. Loading testing tool contributes to identifying slow areas where performance needs to increase so that developer can improve that part in the next release.

Mobile testing: The execution time taken by manual testing is huge and the number of devices emerging every day in the market increases the complexity. Well planned automation suite for mobile devices is generally executed with each build as it ensures that the code does not break.

Automated Testing Benefits in an Agile Environment

"Speed, quality, feedback, efficiency are all benefits that we experience using automation for our tests."

“PRACTICE MAKES THE TEAM SUCCESSFUL, HAPPY TESTING”