What is Agile Testing? Know about Methods, Advantages and Principles

The complexity of the software development process is increasing continuously. The software testing approaches need to evolve to keep up with the development approaches. So, What is Agile Testing? In this article I will provide in-depth knowledge about the agile methodology in the following sequence:

• • What is Agile Testing?
  • Principles of Agile Testing
  • Advantages
  • Agile Testing Methods
  • Life Cycle
  • Test Plan & Quadrants
  • Companies using Agile Testing

What is Agile Testing?

Agile Testing is a type of software testing that follows the principle of agile software development. It is an iterative development methodology and the requirements evolve through collaboration between the customer and self-organizing teams.

An agile team works as a single team towards a common objective of achieving Quality. Agile Testing has shorter time frames that are known as iterations.

Principles of Agile Testing

The different principles involved in Agile Testing include:

• Testing is continuous: Agile team performs testing continuously because it is the only way to ensure continuous progress of the product.
• Continuous feedback: Agile testing provides feedback on an ongoing basis so that your product can meet the business needs.
• Tests performed by the whole team: In the software development life cycle, only the test team is responsible for testing. But in agile testing, the developers and the business analysts also test the application.

• Decrease time of feedback response: The business team is involved in each iteration in agile testing. So continuous feedback reduces the time of feedback response.
• Simplified & clean code: The defects raised by the agile team are fixed in the same iteration. This helps in keeping the code clean and simplified.
• Less documentation: Agile teams use a reusable checklist and the team focuses on the test instead of the incidental details.
• Test Driven: In agile methods, you need to perform testing at the time of implementation. But in the traditional process, the testing is performed after implementation.

Advantages of Agile Testing

The benefits of Agile Testing approach include:

• It saves time and money
• Agile testing reduces documentation
• It is flexible and highly adaptable to changes
• It provides a way for receiving regular feedback from the end user
• Better determination of issues through daily meetings

Agile Testing Methods

There are three main agile testing methods such as:

Behavior Driven Development(BDD) – It improves communication amongst project stakeholders so that all members correctly understand each feature before the development process starts. There is continuous example-based communication between developers, testers, and business analysts.

Acceptance Test Driven Development(ATDD) – It focuses on involving team members with different perspectives such as the customer, developer, and tester. The meetings are held to formulate acceptance tests incorporating perspectives of the customer, development, and testing.

Exploratory Testing – It emphasizes working software over comprehensive documentation. The individuals and interactions are more important than the process and tools. Customer collaboration holds greater value than contract negotiation.

Life Cycle of Agile Testing

There are 5 different phases in the Agile Testing life cycle such as:

1. Impact Assessment – In the first phase you have to gather inputs from stakeholders and users. Now this will be taken as feedback for the next deployment cycle.
2. Agile Testing Planning – Here, the stakeholders come together to plan the schedule of the testing process, meeting frequency, and deliverables.
3. Release Readiness – At this stage, you have to review the features that have been developed and check if they are ready to go live or not.
4. Daily Scrums – This phase includes the everyday morning meetings to check on the status of testing and set the goals for the day.
5. Test Agility Review – The final phase involves the weekly meetings with the stakeholders to review and assess the progress against milestones.

Agile Test Plan & Quadrants

The test plan is written and updated for every release for agile testing.  It includes:

• The scope of the testing
• Consolidating new functionalities to be tested
• Types of testing/Levels of testing
• Performance & load testing
• Consideration of infrastructure
• Risks Plan
• Planning of resources
• Deliverables & Milestones

Quadrants

The agile testing quadrants separate the whole process in four Quadrants. So this helps you in understanding the process of agile testing.

• Agile Quadrant I – This quadrant focuses on the internal code quality. It consists of test cases which are technology driven and are implemented to support the team. It includes:
  1. Unit Tests
  2.Component Tests
• Agile Quadrant II – It contains test cases that are business driven and are implemented to support the team. This Quadrant focuses on the requirements. The kind of tests performed in this phase include:
  1. Testing of possible scenarios and workflows
  2. Testing of User experience
  3. Pair testing
• Agile Quadrant III – This quadrant provides feedback to quadrants one and two. The test cases can be used as the basis to perform automation testing. Here, many rounds of iteration reviews are carried out which builds confidence in the product. The kind of testings done in this quadrant are:
  1. Usability Testing
  2. Exploratory Testing
  3. Pair testing with customers
  4. Collaborative testing
  5. User acceptance testing
• Agile Quadrant IV – The fourth quadrant concentrates on the non-functional requirements such as performance, security, stability, etc. This quadrant helps the application to deliver the non-functional qualities and expected value. The tests performed are:
  1. Non-functional tests such as stress and performance testing
  2. Security testing with respect to authentication and hacking
  3. Infrastructure testing
  4. Data migration testing
  5. Scalability testing
  6. Load testing

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Now that you know the different test plan and quadrants of agile testing, let’s have a look at the companies that are using this methodology.

Companies Using Agile Testing

Agile testing reduces the cost of bugs by fixing them early. This approach yields a customer-centric approach by delivering a high-quality product as early as possible. So most of the companies have started implementing agile testing methodology. Some of the names include:

• Sky
• Philips
• Vistaprint
• JP Morgan Chase
• IBM
• Cisco

With this, we have come to the end of our article. I hope you understood the methodologies of agile testing and why it is important in the world of software testing.

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