What are the best ways to test software in short sprints?

Some ground rules to be applied: -Involve everyone in the grooming discussion - this helps knowing broader objectives. -Plan automation along with development stories and evaluate nightly results over automated ways. You can't afford failures for your P0, P1, P2 cases any day. -Keep in consideration that performance and security testing should not be triggered as reactive to some issue/incident, plan them early and factor them in your design.

Test software effectively in short sprints by adopting automated testing, focusing on critical functionalities, and prioritizing exploratory testing. Align testing efforts with development tasks to ensure continuous integration and early defect detection. Encourage collaboration between developers and testers to enhance communication and streamline the testing process. Leverage test-driven development principles to guide testing efforts and maintain a balance between thorough testing and meeting sprint timelines.

Also, beyond usual functional testing, shift left principles are increasingly applied to security testing. Identifying and addressing security vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle can significantly reduce the risk of security breaches and the associated costs of addressing vulnerabilities in a later stage.

Usage of TDD by developers helps facilitate it. Well designed CI pipelines also help gain confidence in correctness of software. Automated tests in say Selenium etc are also essential.

In test-driven development, you start by writing a test before creating the actual code. This test is designed to fail initially. After writing the test, you then write the code to make that test pass. It's like setting a challenge for yourself, and once you've written the code successfully, you've met that challenge. This method helps ensure that your code does what it's supposed to do, and it's a step-by-step way of building and checking your work.

Test driven development can often sound intimidating or sound like a lot of effort. This is why renowned software developer Martin Fowler now describes TDD as one approach to creating self-testing code which is a more outcome focussed method of describing this practice. The goal of TDD is to create self-testing code. We do this to save time, effort, and investment, as we effectively know whether we are building code that meets our standards from the start of development rather than waiting until the end.

What I love about the BDD approach is it serves as a form of documentation that is human-readable and accessible to non-technical stakeholders. The natural language descriptions in BDD scenarios act as a living documentation, providing an up-to-date reference for the expected behavior of the system to all the relevant stake holders so that they can provide their inputs in a timely fashion.

Good user stories should be written with tests in mind. Once an agile team is fully confident in its ability to deliver on acceptance criteria, then exploratory testing can be introduced as an additional layer of evaluation on the feature. Remember, software is written to solve customer problems, not to check off a list of requirements. However, testing too far from the ticket scope can be frustrating to the agile team. Being able to distinguish between bugs, UX suggestions, future enhancements, feature revisions, etc., allows you to prioritize more effectively.

Testing software in short sprints requires a strategic and effective approach to maintain quality and on-time delivery. By incorporating testing early in the development cycle, prioritising critical features and automating repetitive tasks, teams can effectively test software within limited sprint time. Using a combination of testing techniques, encouraging collaboration and continuously learning from feedback further increases the effectiveness of testing and ensures consistent and efficient delivery of high-quality software. However, I would like to emphasise that in order to do all of this, you really need to have a team that knows the processes and the project very well and that your project is adaptable to these methods.

The goal is to deliver a potentially shippable product each sprint, which means the product should be ready to ship out at any time. This necessitates the team to conduct testing to verify each increment. Be creative with your testing approach - Keep testing aspects in mind for your Definition of Done (DoD) - Automate testing efforts wherever possible to help to efficiently handle this repetitive set of tasks, the optimal approach is to implement automation, enabling the execution of tests with minimal effort on a consistent basis. - Remember testing is part of the process throughout and not something that is done at the end