QA & Testing Ensuring Success to Agile Project
Writing by AppLabs on Thursday, 12 of February, 2009 at 12:18 pm
To ensure the success of development projects in an Agile environment, engage the test teams from the start, and by the by have the previously independent contributors (Business Analysts, Developers, Testers, End Users etc.) work together in teams.
An Agile development uses a ‘Test Driven Development’ (TDD) approach. An approach where the team and the project stakeholders all contribute to kick-off meetings where the ‘user stories’ are selected for the next sprint (Sprints in an Agile project can extend to multiple levels in a complex system), which are used as the basis for a set of tests. The testers create test scenarios, which after the approval are broken down to test cases, which further offer adequate test coverage for the given functionality. The developers then write code that will pass the tests. In this approach the development and testing take place continuously throughout the sprint, for minimal defects and low implementation risk. As functionality grows with each iteration, regression testing must be performed to ensure that existing functionality has not been impacted by the introduction of new functionality in each iteration cycle. Defect fixes should also be followed by extensive regression testing.
The scale of the regression testing grows with each sprint and to ensure that this remains a manageable task the test team should use test automation for the regression suite and focus their manual testing effort towards locating new defects during the build phase. In the Release Phase, prior to releasing a product, a final acceptance test is performed before transitioning the application into production. The testing activities listed above are not exhaustive but broadly cover the areas which the testing team contributes to the Agile approach.
Engaging test teams from the beginning of every iterative development cycle and not just after the first couple of sprints will hence ensure an accelerated delivery of working software. And the testing team in return must develop the necessary mindset, wherein their own agility and flexibility will prove the key to their success in the project.
Category: Software Testing
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