Top 10 Benefits of Testing Software in an Agile Environment
Satisfying the customer with the quick delivery of the product, focusing on a shorter timescale, having face-to-face interactions with teams and clients, fulfilling the changing needs even late in the development process is some of the principles to make a process agile. First of all, you need to understand the meaning of Agile that can help you know the benefits of testing software in an Agile environment.
Agile is the methodology or practice that was started in the spring of 2000 when a group of about 17 software developers, including Jon Kern, Martin Fowler, Jim Highsmith, Bob Martin, Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland met in Oregon to discuss how they could speed up development times to bring software to market faster. They gave importance to two key opportunities to meet their goals:
● Reducing the gap of consumer benefits to resolve the issues of product-market fit and
development graveyard.
● Acquiring user’s feedback instantly to validate the effectiveness of new applications and
continue to develop them accordingly.
Therefore, agile methodology comes as a blessing for companies around the world because it helps change the way apps are made and ensures faster project deliveries. The reason for testing software in an agile environment is it offers versatility, better results, quicker time to market, improved cost efficiency and increased release. Automation testing and continuous testing have always been an essential part of Agile and app developments lifecycle. Testing is integrating from the initial phases, unlike the traditional approaches. Moreover, with agile testing, one can easily assure the reliability, accuracy, quality of products services before giving them to customers save time without any hassle.
Our further blog will be based on the top 10 benefits of testing software in an Agile environment, so you don’t need to go anywhere. Just have a look below:
Excellent level of Communication & Collaboration
One of the biggest benefits of performing software testing with agile methodologies it permits for excellent and consistent communication and collaboration between the development and testing teams. In the end, one can solve complex issues quickly. When the team of architects, developers, testers and programmers work together and communicate with each other throughout the entire lifecycle, it becomes easier for everyone in the company to obtain test results within a few periods of time.
2. Higher Coverage
In the digital world, test automation is the new normal and adopted by more and more companies worldwide to enhance the scope and depth of tests. In past times, when there were no automated testing frameworks, testing was done only manually. Today, there is no obligation on testers. They can create a test suite for the app’s features, such as data tables, memory contents, and internal programs. With automated testing, they have the freedom to execute thousands of complex test cases. Testing software with a combination of operating systems and devices helps testers achieve higher test coverage.
3. Reusability
With increasing test automation tools, software developers feel easy when it comes to re-running the tasks several times and managing configuration processes in Agile. Also, with any newly discovered problem, the directory gets updated, and the operating cost decreases by as much as 70%. Due to that, agile teams consider the reusability of test cases, and this gives them not only cost-effective benefits but also reduces the chances of bugs and defects.
4. Improved Quality
One can clearly identify output in shorter cycles when the software is tested with agile best
practices. It provides a higher level of visibility on the different levels of project quality. If anywhere in the project contains issues, the team immediately takes measures and removes glitches at the right time so that after the release of the product, customers can experience quality while using the products. Agile testing is ideal for optimizing the app’s performance and quality. It even protects the app from developing severe defects.
5. Continuous Feedback
Getting continuous feedback is the best approach to resolve the issue during software testing in an Agile environment. The technique of continuous feedback is very different from traditional performance reviews. Similarly, you can’t consider agile development as the waterfall model because both approaches vary from each other. In agile, the strengths and weaknesses of team members are faster identified for experiencing growth and productivity.
6. Less Documentation
The agile development strategy reminds the teams for documentation when necessary. In the case of a high level of documentation, the overall project risk increases in an agile environment as it minimizes the adaptability to changes. You can follow easy hacks to create documents below for your agile-based projects:
● Work with executable specifications.
● Simplify documentation.
● Document as late as possible.
● Purpose oriented documents.
● Ignore overlapping documents.
● Ensure excellent communication.
7. Earlier Detection of Defects
As documentation of software bugs becomes easier for testing companies, increasing the overall development speed is too easy. This ensures that the app or product will perform functions correctly across areas. The faster the testing team finds a defect in the software, the more affordable it is to address the issues.
8. Easy Maintenance
The maintenance is much simpler due to decreased risks of failures while testing the software. In agile testing, companies involve multiple testers and developers to reduce the chances of testing issues. When testing performs manually, the process consumes so much time of testers and the development team. The agile approach saves time when avoiding repeated testing, and automation testing is carried out.
9. Information Security
The quality of the test data you use decides the effectiveness of testing. It takes considerable time to construct quality test data manually. As a result, one performs the research as per the copies of live databases. Automation solutions help you create, manipulate, protect your test databases, and re-use your data again.
10. Faster Time-to-Market
According to the Project Management Institute, the study shows that industries with high agility fulfill 19% of business goals more than those with low agility. Test automation allows consistent execution of test cases and dramatically helps minimize the time-to-market of an application. Once you automate your tests in an agile environment, you may experience the test library’s implementation faster than manual testing.
Wrapping Up
Today, the software is tested with various testing types such as integration testing, system testing, unit testing, sanity testing, regression testing, functional testing, beta/acceptance testing, regression testing, and many more. Statistics from Forrester and Gartner reveal that 60 to 80% of development teams follow agile methodologies as their primary strategies for developing and testing software.
One can efficiently perform testing in an agile environment and meet the specific client’s needs with flexibility and minimize the cost of change by ten times. To know some more benefits of agile software testing, you can do personal research, mainly if you aim to achieve the best level of quality for your business products and services.
Author Bio:
Claire Mackerras is a Senior QA Engineer & Editor associated with BugRaptors. A CMMi5 a certified company with extensive experience as a third-party testing vendor in the US. She is very passionate about writing on technological trends for manual & automation software testing. She likes to share her knowledge, with readers who are interested in exploring testing tacts and trends.
