Agile Automation Testing: Techniques and Guidelines
Even as more businesses adopt Agile, its fundamental ideas must be understood. This project management style highly values the attainment of excellent working outcomes, communication and feedback, and change adaption.
Given that it is completed in sprints, each builds upon and improves upon the preceding one; it is often iterative. However, a corporation must adhere to a few methods before adopting agile.
This post will provide additional knowledge about agile automation testing by examining its methodology and some recommended practices. By the time you've finished reading this article, we want you to know a lot about agile automation testing.
Let's go right to the point.
What is Agile Automation Testing?
Agile automation, as its name indicates, is a methodology that incorporates test automation. This occurs throughout software creation, and its major goal is to ensure that the process is effective and efficient without sacrificing quality, timeliness, or resource consumption.
Implementing agile automation testing necessitates close team communication and coordination. Therefore, automated testing’s primary goal is saving time and money. As some may anticipate, it does not identify brand-new, inventive flaws but only validates existing ones.
Given your understanding of agile, automated testing, let's examine some techniques.
Methods
1.? ? Exploratory Testing
The test design is followed by test execution, analysis, and learning before the cycle is repeated. Agile testers must draw on their specialized skill set because the tests are not prescribed but created by the testers as they explore the product.
This technique helps testers determine whether any program is functional. Additionally, they can find faults that are difficult to find using various testing techniques.
2.? ? ? Session-Based Testing
This testing approach enhances and improves exploratory testing. By introducing structure, it addresses exploratory testing’s strength-cum-weakness, which results from the inventiveness of individuals who do it. Typically, a charter is drafted before a test session starts.
“Paraphrase” is a term used to describe the process of concentrating. Once the test is finished, the entire session is reported on, and the manager is brought up to speed. This approach prevents backlogs by extensively testing every component of the product.
3.? ? ? Acceptance Test-Driven Development
This type of test-driven development considers the collaborative nature of agile testing. It forges a union between clients, developers, and testers to guarantee that acceptance tests are built to represent what the client would have wanted.
The relevant functionality is then produced. By providing developers with knowledge about customer needs and the intended usage of the product, it provides a simple approach to creating test cases. This eliminates ambiguity and avoids major errors.
4.? ? ? Behavior-driven Development
This approach improves upon test-driven development’s acceptance criteria by drawing on them. This technique leverages the structure of these two to determine the appropriate business results. Based on these results, tests are then carried out.
Best Practices
Automation testing is crucial in the development of an application. The issues it presents can typically lead to application failure if automated testing is not done properly.?
Let’s review eight recommended practices to ensure that your automated testing is more successful, depending on your agile development method.
1.? ? Make Certain to Perform Parallel Testing
Agile development emphasizes continuous delivery with several quick development or deployment pipeline iterations. This is a significant factor in why individuals only sometimes obtain the expected outcomes from agile automation testing. As a result, QA teams must be more staffed even during frequent regression testing sprints.
Because of the short testing cycles, testers often need help locating, repairing, and testing the results of each iteration. This necessitates setting up enough time for testing, including automation testing.
A company can do this using parallel testing, which entails running many test threads concurrently. As a result, test durations are further decreased, the automation process is enhanced, and an agile team's productivity is increased.
Additionally, because of parallel testing, testers may devote more time to exploratory testing and problem-solving.
2.? ? ? Make Sure to Create Quality Tests
We suggest that you create reliable, high-caliber testing. Agile testers should develop quality test scripts that are simple to combine with regression testing. Whether scripted or not makes no difference: they must be adaptable enough. This aids in their adaptation to the ongoing needs of regression testing.
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As a result, correctness, maintainability, integrity, portability, versioning, performance, and portability must all be tested. If they meet these six requirements, the testers will execute regression testing automatically, precisely, and well without requiring human input.
Regression testing requires no needless alterations, thanks to consistent and reliable test scripts.
3.? ? ? Make Smart Automation Tool Selections
This is frequently one of the most difficult tasks before the start of automated testing. How do you pick the appropriate automation tool? How can you tell if your decision is the best one? These are a few of the inquiries that must be made.
Assessing the capabilities of your testing tool can prevent you from wasting time and money. Ensure that your tool satisfies your testing needs and guarantees that your test automation efforts will be worthwhile.
Several functionalities should pass the functionality test, but only some should. These are:
4.? ? ? Consider Automation a Developmental Process
The ideal approach to automated testing is to think of it as a development component. It needs to be seen as an integral component of agile development. This will enable you to speed up the testing procedure. To avoid falling into any of these two traps, you must be cautious when doing this:
Automation should reflect changes noticed after a new feature has been added. It may also be used for regression testing, which necessitates repeated test execution.
Never try to get 100% code coverage since it doesn't exist. Manual or automated testing cannot cover the complete program code. Even if you try to test every single line of code, the test's quality is not determined by this. As a result, we advocate using one-to-one test translation, which is crucial for automated testing. Even so, it is hard to automate the process fully. Therefore, you will still need a complete test coverage of the application.
What is the appropriate course of action based on these two scenarios? Keeping the test cases short and to the point is the best method for doing efficient automated testing. Even while they allow you to make rapid modifications that adhere to the regression criteria, they are typically difficult to implement.
This strategy will also reduce the maintenance of extensive test suites with numerous scenarios, scripts, and settings. Small and efficient test cases will significantly lighten the development process's workload.
5.? ? ? Make sure you can see the testing process from all angles.
Various people in various roles come together during the product development process. The project managers, along with several additional team members, are listed below. Everyone on the project team should participate in the testing process rather than just the testers and quality assurance personnel.
The automated process should be simple to understand and accessible, and all project participants should be informed of the findings. It is also important to get each member's opinion on the trends, the general quality of the code, and test process data. These may support the introduction of further automation.
Making the findings clear will encourage the development of a constructive perspective, which will aid in the routine updating of test scripts and improve teamwork. What you want is this.
6.? ? ? Keep an eye on the working environment
Generally speaking, it is advisable to continuously monitor both the developers and the development environment. Agile development involves a network of components, including the back-end system architecture, front-end interactions, virtual machines, and external databases.
Thus, a problem can originate from anywhere other than the program. Configurations, a particular type of poor network between devices, or even functions inside the development environment might be to blame.
The testing crew must consequently be familiar with how every environment involved in product development operates. This will be useful since it ensures that the team concentrates more than attempting to find the root of the issue and the quality of the final result.
To guarantee that test automation is successful and efficient as required for agile development, this best practice in agile automation testing necessitates the team always be on the lookout for the various processes on top of everything in place.
7.? ? ? Cross-Browser and Cross-Platform Testing Should Be Done From The Beginning Stages.
Given the traffic growth, cross-browser compatibility becomes crucial during the final phases of agile development. Early on, one should anticipate little traffic from engaged browsers. To minimize the resource and time intensiveness of the latter phases, greater emphasis should be placed on making the complete product cross-browser compatible at the early stages.
Therefore, we suggest that you test your application across browsers right away. For startups, investing in testing infrastructure may be expensive; in these situations, you can use the cloud. You may obtain several browsers to conduct your tests on and a scalable cloud infrastructure that doesn't need any upkeep, development, or scalability.
8.? ? ? Integrate DevOps effectively
DevOps is useful because agile development involves development, testing, and operations. As a result, it is a crucial tool for agile development teams. It offers several advantages, including cross-functionality and teamwork, for rapidly creating features and ongoing software development processes.
Shared working environments are another concept recognized by DevOps. This means that concurrent and real-time development and code integration will also occur in addition to automated testing. The end consequence is a better-positioned and more effective development life cycle.
These are some of the best practices for agile, automated testing that every testing and agile team should follow.
The Final Word:
QA teams must embrace an Agile attitude, which entails consistently looking for new methods to make changes, in addition to the eight Agile test automation best practices described above. In their ongoing quest to create high-quality, dependable systems, more and more QA teams might profit from adhering to these best practices.