How do you ensure test coverage in agile SDLC?

Test coverage in agile SDLC refers to the practice of verifying that all parts of the software are tested before being deployed. This is done to increase the quality and reliability of the software. Agile teams generally follow automated test coverage, and the testing process is done iteratively. Code review, manual testing, and exploratory testing are some of the methods used to achieve test coverage. Regular reports are generated to track the progress and areas that need improvement.

Test charters as test strategies enable productive, creative, reactive and user focused testing. The charters have higher ROI at system level testing than the genre of developer style testing prescriptions found in automation practices. Understanding user behaviors, the pains and gains of users, user expectations provoking unexpected user choices is important. Knowledge of possibly impacted functionality and user journeys is also important in charter-driven testing. Knowing how to test at boundary conditions and in negative or unspecified conditions are enabled by charters. These 1990s manual agile testing principles are often forgotten or never known to the SDET automate-first mindsets.

A large part of test strategy is defining test coverage. It helps to identify if there is any gap in testing and overall a quality measurement of the software product. Some best practices for test coverage are: -- Align and prioritize testing the critical features and functionalities that have the most impact on the user satisfaction and value delivery. -- Using different types of test coverage like, statement coverage to check basic functionality, branch coverage to check decision points, path coverage to check complex scenarios. -- Continuous monitoring and improvement of the test coverage throughout the SDLC. Regular review the test coverage, update the test cases as the code changes, add new test cases as new features are added.

??Sometimes you need a best test approach which may called Test Plan or Test Strategy or Test Policy or Test Scenario based on your organisation's documentation plans but the recommendation is to have a solid plan to start test approach. ??In large organisations, Master Test Policy followed by Test Strategy and number of Test Plans but agile based teams may not need one in modern world! ??Irrespective of agile or waterfall or XP, I tend to design a Test Strategy that drives the whole quality engineering with best practices to give holistic view to the whole organisation

To ensure test coverage in SDLC there are several key practices which can help in effectively managing and validating the software quality throughout the development cycles. Define Clear Acceptance Criteria: Collaborate closely with stakeholders, including product owners and developers, to define and prioritize user stories with clear acceptance criteria. Implement Test Automation: Automated tests help ensure consistent and comprehensive coverage across different iterations and allow teams to execute tests frequently without significant manual effort. CI and CT: Automate the execution of tests as part of the build process, ensuring that each code change is validated against the existing functionality and integration points.

Consider building and integrating automated tests to ensure the critical and core functionality is not broken each time you make changes to your code.

??Shift Left Test Automation is a key in Test Automation since Time is ??Money in this Quality Engineering World! If tests missed to get converted to test automation are heavy tech debt that may kill the overall business when picked up at later date! ??It is also a practice that needs to be strictly followed since early times of application development! Reference article: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/what-best-tool-start-automation-testing-narayanan-palani/?lipi=urn%3Ali%3Apage%3Ad_flagship3_profile_view_base_post_details%3BJVRtL0m2TUm2KO%2Bf6xlP8A%3D%3D

Automation focuses a tester on success patterns, making a test run. It takes focus away from finding bugs, from creative inductive reasoning and being the user or consuming system. QA must be balanced by great testing first, automating later.

I agree. Test automation isn't a silver bullet. It's one of many options available for testing software. There's a lot of value in having human tester's as well. Humans do unexpected things. For example, they ignore field labels and input illegal characters, they click UI elements they shouldn't -- and do so repeatedly, and they fiddle with URLs, cookies, etc. Humans can submit several requests to a web service and fill up it's queue. Humans can also test usability, provide useful bug reports, and more. With current automation tools, humans can record their actions during test cycles and play them back during regression tests. Many products have disclaimers, manuals, and other documentation because humans can use them incorrectly.

Test automation supplements manual testing. It is not the right approach in early sprint cycles when the code may undergo repair and change.

Yes, and the best part of TDD is that it has a huge return on investment when the time comes to refactor production code. All those unit tests make refactoring way easier.

I disagree with the statement that TDD increases productivity. TDD can increase effectiveness, but not productivity per se. If productivity is measured by LOCs or number of functions per some unit of time, then TDD isn't necessarily the way. TDD can cause developers to slow down. It's a different way of thinking about building code. It takes time to increase velocity, especially with a new methodology. TDD also requires discipline to ensure that tests are cohesive. Finding the right level of granularity can be difficult. TDD doesn't replace fundamental principles of software design.

BDD and TDF often enable the unagile mindset that you pre-specify a perfection solution in simple if-then-else statements, often at very low levels. At high levels that bdd is not a sufficient basis of test cases, so BDD is like a test charter, worded poorly, then useful test cases emerge during test design. Too often the develope-level TDD enables the wrong level of testing (white box) and surpresses the team's learning and discovery that agile embraces as code is developed. The test driven ideas are fine for developers to selftest their code, but deceptively wrong as a system or QA test where proper charters work better.

Test Driven Development is an integral part of embedding quality assurance in developing solutions. It provides a constant reflection, leading to better performance across the entire development lifecycle.

In my experience writing cucumber test cases for microservice project are very useful verify whether all the functionalities developed in the sprint is not breaking a feature or introducing a new defect. Gherkins language makes it easy for the product team to define the test cases for the API's.

Yes, this is pretty standard today for any software shop. But the focus should be on function not form. Function: does the code do what it's supposed to, is it performant, does it validate data in and out, etc. Form: does the code adhere to coding conventions, does the code have consistent formatting, etc. Form should be checked by linters. Function should be checked by people.

The functional and technical specs that define the Acceptance criteria are the drivers for building the sprint test suites. Mind maps help to lay out the functions in picture format for everybody to review the intended coverage

I disagree that a person needs to collect these metrics manually. A tool like SonarQube can help collect metrics like code coverage. Also, it provides a measure of maintainability. CI/CD tools like Team City or Jenkins can gather runtime and execution logs. Developers should focus on building functionality and ensuring their code is readable, maintainable, and extensible. Tests should be performant and grouped logically into test suites, and only tests covering a code change run during CI, unless a full regression test is needed. This approach enables scaling the code base and development team, and it helps keep CI/CD expedient.

??Majority of organisations tend to write test automation which is actually a "test (failed)automation" due to number of times the tests fails due to application/test/data flakiness. ??Well maintained test automation is the only way to get a success in long term!

In rapid development environments I have seen that code can be migrated to higher environments without unit test cases. Setting up a minimum code coverage requirement to the build pipeline will force the development team to write unit test cases for the functionalities developed.

From my experience if this is a customer used application, test it as the customer is using it, but the person who wrote the application.

Testers need to collaborate with the Business Analysts to create a shared understanding of the end-to-end business processes that the software must support. Use the 80/20 rule to identify the most common scenarios and a handful of exceptions to the business process. Set up the test scripts to run through those processes. When they are stored in a central place, it makes it easer to modify just the portions of the scripts that are changing with the software change. Also account for the business rules that need to be supported. Plan for positive, negative and regression testing. (The change does what it is supposed to do; the change doesn't do what it is not supposed to do; and the whole system still does what it's supposed to do.)

Besides ensuring we have a proper test strategy & test plan, you should also have a requirements traceability matrix to ensure proper coverage. Another challenge is ensuring that you have realistic suites of test data for your test scenarios. This is something that needs to be planned for especially when you have to deal with sensitive data that needs to be scrubbed/anonymized.

One thing I've learned over the years is how critically important it is that you incorporate real-life scenarios early in the testing cycle. Every organization I've worked at always seems to have that one person with a talent for breaking things. No matter how detailed the requirements were or how robust the test plan was, we always encountered scenarios where someone would use the software in a way we hadn't envisioned. Eventually we learned that identifying that individual became critical to our test strategy. As painful as the exercise was at times, I can confidently say that it played a dramatic and measurable role in improving overall product quality.

Could not agree more with Emily Tom. Would highly recommend a rotation of paired analyst/tester collaboration through requirements and test case development. One of the most eye-opening lessons I ever had.

Quality Assurance is a different process to Quality Control. Assurance is holistic, across all parts of a system, and even extends to communication and collaboration. Consider the the idea of mistake-proofing from the Shingo Method, which is about adding techniques to prevent defects and detect defects as soon as possible if one does occur-- because costs rise as defect detection leaves your development cycles. See my article about this at https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/how-my-high-performing-cohesive-team-embeds-quality-kester-terry/