According to the World Quality Report, 2010/2011 by Capgemini and HP over 60% of companies have either already adopted agile methods or are planning to do so in the near future.  Agile Testing has been gaining popularity over the last few years due to several reasons such as the faster product development lifecycles and quicker Go to market cycles (GTM.

Some of the factors that affect the progress and outcome of sprints are:

  • Reduced Coverage: Compressed time frames in each sprint, forces the Test Engineers to test only the areas that have changed in the sprint.  A complete regression cycle is not being conducted on the rest of the application leaving it susceptible to major flaws
  • Traditional tools that were designed to work in a ‘test last’ environment, struggle to work in an agile environment that is designed for the ‘test first, test continuously’ model. New agile specific tools from Version One or Rally Software, can be used
  • Agile Testing allows requirements to creep in any time during any phase of the project and it will be accommodated in the already allotted functionalities to be validated

To address these issues, a suite of automated testing solutions can be formulated that enable smarter sprints that help to meet deadlines and timely qualitative releases.

And some of the best practices that can yield great results for such short GTMs and provide quick ROI are:

  • Refactoring/Regression-Performing  Bug fixes, refactoring old code and running extensive regression testing, every few weeks to focus on stability, takes care of missed bugs during the ongoing testing process
  • Testing from a Customer Point of View: Sharing good stories with customer-relevant material, with the development team as well as the testing team
  • Test ideas can be compiled in a presentation shared with the developers and developers can take live feedback helping developers start thinking about whether their software will pass such tests
  • Frequently run tests or procedures, or those that take the most time, if automated, can generate a big ROI

Adopting these core points can hugely impact the overall testing process.

 

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