An Ultimate Guide to Continuous Testing in Agile Projects.pdf
0 likes150 views
As more businesses apply Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to release their software faster, Continuous testing becomes the final piece that completes a continuous development process. By automatically testing code right after developers submit it to the repository, testers can locate bugs before another line of code is written.
More Related Content
What's hot (17)
Similar to An Ultimate Guide to Continuous Testing in Agile Projects.pdf (20)
More from KMSSolutionsMarketin (15)
Recently uploaded (20)
An Ultimate Guide to Continuous Testing in Agile Projects.pdf
- 1. A KMS Company AN ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CONTINUOUS TESTING IN AGILE PROJECTS
- 2. INTRODUCTION As more businesses apply Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to release their software faster, Continuous testing becomes the final piece that completes a continuous development process. By automatically testing code right after developers submit it to the repository, testers can locate bugs before another line of code is written.
- 3. QUALITY CHALLENGES ENCOUNTERED A KMS Company 3 The more software products a company builds or uses, the more vulnerable it becomes to downtime and software failure. According to IDC, unexpected downtime in software costs the Fortune 1000 from 1,25 billion to 2,5 billion dollars every year. And for every hour of failure in a critical application, they would lose from 0,5 to 1 million dollars on average. When preventing such costly disruptions, testers face the following 4 challenges. These challenges require testers to follow the maxim: test earlier, test more often, and test faster. This is why Continuous Testing becomes more popular. So what is it and which roles does it play in a software development lifecycle? Testing bottlenecks: different testers use different tools and methods to perform testing. In other words, there is no standard testing workflow that everyone can follow. Incompatible tools: Different testing tools are not integrated with each other, which results in independent workflows and incomplete CI/CD pipeline. Ineffective reporting: Reports lack critical information, making it harder to troubleshoot problems and to perform software audits. Inadequate coverage: Testers fail to maximize test coverage on multiple layers and system integrations since they do not have enough time or testing tools.
- 4. A KMS Company 4 CONTINUOUS TESTING Continuous Testing means executing automated tests early and throughout the Continuous Delivery process so that teams receive feedback on the software as quickly as possible. To make Continuous Testing work, the rate of automation must be 85% or higher. Continuous Testing has been around for 10 years now. But it was not until recently that more teams turned to this approach to support CI/CD and DevOps. Continuous Testing is what enables “Quality at Speed”. In its Magic Quadrant, Gartner cited Continuous Testing as one of the critical capabilities for Software Test Automation. The key elements of Continuous Testing include: Risk assessment to identify areas that are vulnerable to risks so that teams can proactively reduce them. Requirement Traceability to make sure that test scripts meet business requirements. Shift-left Testing to test earlier in the development process, rather than at later stages as in the traditional method. Automated Testing to use software or tools to manage test execution. Test Optimization to test faster while ensuring accuracy. Service Virtualization to emulate the behaviors of components that are not easy or possible to access when testing.
- 5. A KMS Company 5 Understanding the current Quality Maturity: Quality Process To apply Continuous Testing to your Agile projects, there are 3 key requirements: understanding the current Quality Maturity, making proper preparation, and applying practices, checklists, and guidelines. Extending team collaboration: Collaboration isn’t only about the synergy among teams within a project, but also about the collaboration among projects across the company. Dev & Test to work as One team: The silo that separates developers and testers must be broken down so that these 2 teams can work as one. Unified workflow across Dev/QA/Build & Operations: All teams must adhere to the same workflow. This requires the project leaders to build flowcharts or Kanban boards well before the project starts. And team members must also use the same “ecosystem” of tools, each of which is integrated with the other. Building a strong Agile Methodology: Agile is the core foundation of a quality process. Leaders must define an Agile discipline that does not only meet the software requirements but also the team’s working style. HOW CONTINUOUS TESTING IS DONE IN A PROJECT To decide how mature your testing process is, it’s key to consider Quality Process, Automation Methodology, Scalability of QA Structure, and CI/CD Integration. Higher coverage with GUI functional testing: Testing visual elements such as buttons, images, and texts to make sure they function as specified. Running automated tests at the service layer: By testing the service layer (otherwise known as the middle layer of the pyramid model), testers can validate the business logic of the software, without accounting for the user interface. Final validation by Manual “Experts”: Testers who are experienced in manual testing will identify bugs that test automation tools are unable to identify. Automated Integration Tests: This requires testers to run automated test cases to test the interface between modules/software units. Automation Methodology
- 6. Scalability of QA Structure Leverage virtual & independent test infrastructure: Building and deploying test infrastructure on the Cloud. Eliminate dependencies and bottlenecks on infrastructure: The testers’ environment should be independent of the developers’ environment. Automatically trigger builds on code check-in: Triggering new software builds right after codes are uploaded for checking. Build basic code quality and unit test gates in CI: Checking code’s quality and the unit tests’ coverage. Run automated acceptance tests: Integrating acceptance tests into the main CI pipeline. CI/CD Integration A KMS Company 6 Proper Preparation After assessing the testing process, it’s critical to prepare the teams and tools for Continuous Testing. Developers should support testers by spending more time on building high-quality unit tests or optimizing their own codes. Hold developers responsible for testing: To perform continuous testing, testers need at least a foundational knowledge of automated testing, and know what software artifact to test and what not to test. Teach Testers to code: Testers should estimate the time and efforts that go into testing any given software artifact so that they can organize their testing activities more effectively. Start with testability in mind: It’s critical to create documents that contain key metrics such as costs, software quality, or speed of software release. These metrics will support project leads and business analysts to make better decisions when optimizing the testing process. Set up metrics:
- 7. A KMS Company 7 Apply practices, checklists, & guidelines Back then, testers had to put up with the Inverted Pyramid Testing model. In this approach, testers would spend most of the time on manually checking the interface layer. And they had little left to perform acceptance tests and unit tests. This Inverted Pyramid Approach, while covering most of the functions and ensuring a smooth testing workflow, requires nonessential headcounts, and any changes to the interface would have a direct impact on the result of the testing process. Later on, pioneers like Alister Scott turned this pyramid upside down. This new approach requires testers to shift their focus to unit tests because they deliver faster results and allow testers to locate bugs faster. Testers then run automated tests on APIs and Web Services layers to test the integration between modules. The next step is to run automated tests on the interface to ensure end-to-end testing and detect errors in this interface. The final step is to manually test using exploratory testing to detect bugs that are not easily detected, or covered fully, by automated testing. Tips to improve the efficiency of Continuous Testing. Apply CI & Automated Build to reduce human errors associated with configuration and software build creation. Use consistent names for GUI Widgets to validate that testing scripts are accurate and stable after being written. Keep the service layer “testable” to prevent the testing process from being disrupted due to 3rd parties’ and external services’ errors by building mock servers. Maintain traceability to minimize debug time and reduce the software release time by creating as many logs as possible when coding or creating APIs.
- 8. A KMS Company 8 In an agile project where new features are continuously brought to the production environment, it’s critical to check on software quality throughout the software development process. It’s therefore essential that teams perform software testing as early and frequently as possible. The following are some best practices to consider and apply to projects to improve testing throughout the software development lifecycle. CONTINUOUS TESTING BEST PRACTICES To get the right requirements before a project starts, testers must work in close collaboration with business analysts, whose job is to collect and analyze business requirements. User stories must be presented as clear and informative as possible, accounting for all acceptance criteria that users have defined. Not only functional testing, but testers also need to perform functional testing such as performance testing and security testing. And they should “shift-left” these 2 methods, performing them earlier from the beginning of the project. Next comes Lean Testing. The “Lean” practice is first used by Toyota and is widely applied in Manufacturing. In the context of Continuous Testing, Lean Testing means testers focus on valuable works such as improving testing performance, rather than creating reports or other similar jobs that bring little value. Testers can improve performance by combining exploratory testing and manual testing, or reducing unnecessary documents such as Test plans. Those wasted hours should be invested in improving software testing. Collaboration with business Lean Testing
- 9. Implementing QA Practices It’s typical that in Agile, teams work by a set of short sprints, each lasts from 1 to 2 weeks. Therefore, it’s important to create a unified document that contains the best practices and standards for testers to follow. This is when the test strategy starts to work. Organizing practical workshops on a regular basis is also a great way to improve testers’ knowledge and soft skills that are important to projects. The last and most important practice is to apply automated testing to Continuous Testing. Thanks to Automated Testing, team members can receive feedback on their software testing as fast as possible. But not everyone can succeed with continuous testing, or can optimize their software testing. It’s critical to know what best practices to use in software testing, when to use automated testing and when not to use it, whether or not to apply the pyramid model for software testing. There are a lot of elements to consider before getting into automated testing. A KMS Company 9 Automated Testing
- 10. KMS Solutions works closely with leading software companies across the globe to bring the most advanced and innovative technologies to Asia Pacific. The focus is to help organizations achieve their business goals through world-class fit-for-purpose solutions and proven industry best practices. KMS Solutions’ success is ultimately measured by the positive impact that it makes to the client’s business. To learn more about us, visit: https:/ /kms-solutions.asia/ ABOUT KMS SOLUTIONS Continuous testing can benefit teams in a lot of ways. But applying it can be demanding. Before incorporating this testing practice into your software development process, make sure that you have in place a well-defined strategy. This starts with breaking down the silos between each team - developers, testers, and business analysts. The next step is to build an ecosystem of test automation tools that can work seamlessly with each other. A KMS Company CONCLUSION