How do you handle software testing in agile and iterative development environments?

1 Define your testing goals

Before you start testing, it's essential to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and how you will measure it. Testing goals should be tailored to your business objectives, user needs, and quality standards. Additionally, the goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, you may aim to reduce the number of defects by 50% in the next sprint, increase test coverage by 80% in the next release, or achieve a 90% user satisfaction rate in the next beta test.

2 Choose your testing methods

When verifying and validating software, you can choose from several testing methods and techniques depending on your testing goals. Unit testing examines individual components or units of code to ensure they work as expected, while integration testing looks at how different components or units interact with each other and external systems. System testing assesses the whole system or application as a single entity to meet functional and non-functional requirements, and acceptance testing evaluates the system from the user's perspective to meet their expectations and needs. Different techniques, such as black-box, white-box, gray-box, and exploratory testing are used to design and execute test cases. Black-box testing is conducted without knowing internal structure or logic, while white-box testing is done by knowing its internal structure or logic. Gray-box testing is a combination of black-box and white-box testing, while exploratory testing relies on intuition, creativity, and experience to find bugs and issues.

3 Automate your testing process

Agile and iterative development can help you deliver software faster and more frequently, however, this requires more frequent and thorough testing. Manual testing can be slow and prone to errors, which is why it's important to automate the process as much as possible. Automation can run tests faster, repeat tests easily and consistently, detect and fix bugs more efficiently, increase test coverage and quality, and integrate tests with development tools. To do this, you can use various tools and frameworks such as Selenium for web browser testing, JUnit for unit testing in Java, Cucumber for behavior-driven testing using natural language, and Jenkins for continuous integration and delivery.

4 Collaborate with your team and stakeholders

Software testing is not a solo activity and requires collaboration and communication with your team, stakeholders, developers, product owners, users, and customers. This can help you share testing goals and plans, get feedback on the process and outcomes, resolve issues, learn from experiences and expertise, and continuously improve quality. To facilitate collaboration, you can use tools such as Scrum (a framework for agile projects), Kanban (a method for visualizing workflow), Jira (a tool for managing tasks and progress), and Slack (a tool for communication).

5 Adapt to changes and feedback

Software testing is a dynamic and iterative process that requires adaptation and improvement based on changes and feedback, which can come from various sources such as requirements, specifications, technology, tools, users, customers, or the market. It is essential to embrace changes and feedback as opportunities to learn and grow. To do so, you should be flexible and responsive to them; evaluate and prioritize them; implement and test them; monitor and measure their impact; and refine and revise your testing goals, methods, and process accordingly.