How Do You Apply Agile Testing Principles And Practices Across Different Domains And Contexts?

Agile testing is crucial to the creation of applications. The agile testing technique helps the development team’s ability to quickly develop high-quality applications in a fast-paced work environment, test their code constantly and quickly by receiving direct feedback from users, and adapt to changing needs. Agile development emphasizes teamwork, continuous delivery, adaptability, and user-focusedness.

Automation testing works on agile projects allowing agile teams to execute a large number of tests repeatedly in less time to make sure that an application doesn’t break whenever new changes are introduced at the Unit, API, and GUI levels. This increases coverage and spares human testers to do more high-level, exploratory testing.

Although agile testing principles and practices can be applied across different domains and contexts, sometimes it can be challenging. Therefore mastering agile testing requires a greater understanding of the specific needs and requirements of the domain or context in question before applying it in testing.

This article will explain how agile testing principles and practices can be effectively applied in various domains and contexts. But before that, it will first discuss what agile testing is, and why it is important, while also looking at the principles, and life cycle of agile testing.

What is agile testing?

Agile testing is a testing methodology that aims at saving time and money.

It follows the agile software development strategy. Rather than the test-at-the-end approach it takes a test-first strategy emphasizing delivering quality applications early and often with frequent iterations and constant feedback from users or stakeholders.

This testing methodology relies on regular feedback from the end user and requires close collaboration between testers and developers, as well as stakeholders to ensure quality throughout the agile development process.

Testers and developers need to be able to understand the agile process to translate into overall agile requirements. They also need to have a good understanding of the technology being used and how it can be tested effectively to ensure that built features are of high quality and meet user’s needs.

Analysts and stakeholders also need to be involved in the agile process from the start, to provide input on what they want from the application being developed. They also need to deliver feedback throughout the development process so that changes can be made when needed.

Agile testing and coding are performed incrementally and interactively, to build up each feature until it provides enough value to release to production. The two main aspects of agile testing are continuous integration and continuous delivery. Continuous integration is about integrating the code changes into a shared mainline several times a day. In continuous delivery, all the change that passes the test is automatically released into production.

Importance of agile testing

Agile testing is important because it aims to deliver new features with quality that meets the needs of the users. Agile teams focus on working closely with users to get feedback at each iteration and make changes as needed. This helps them to ensure that the application constantly gets improved. Continuous feedback and frequent releases also help agile teams develop a high-quality product.

Agile testing begins at the start of the project, allowing testers to find and fix defects as early as possible in the development process helping testers release applications on time.

The importance of agile testing lies in the communication between testers and developers. Since there is close communication and collaboration among testers and developers in an agile setting, they remain equally involved in the process and utilize their skills in a good way to resolve issues at every stage of the development process.

Agile testing life cycle

The agile testing life cycle includes the stages that agile teams use to plan, execute, and track their testing activities. The agile testing life cycle consists of four main steps:

Planning- This is the initial stage agile testing life cycle, where the test team collects inputs from stakeholders and users, and plans the schedule of the testing process and deliverables which features are testable and the necessary tests that are required. This stage assists the test in setting the objectives for the next life cycle.

Execution- At this stage, the team executes the tests.

Tracking- At this stage, the team tracks the results of the tests, and defect reports, and evaluates or assesses progress against goals.

Closure- This is the last stage where the team reviews the test results and closes out any remaining defects. This stage also decides whether the features that have been developed or implemented need to go back to the previous development phase or not.

Principles and best practices of agile testing to apply across different domains and contexts

Agile testing is a collaborative and iterative approach to testing, which involves continuous feedback, early and frequent testing, and adapting to changing requirements and contexts. applying agile testing principles and practices across different domains and contexts requires having a thorough understanding of testing and regulatory or compliance standards of agile methodology.

Below are some of the key aspects of agile testing principles and practices that can help in testing effectively in any situation.

Continuous integration

One of the key principles of agile testing is continuous integration. Whether it is web development or mobile app development, the principle of agile can be applied in any domain. Integrating code changes continuously allows test teams to identify and fix issues early on, reduce the risk of bugs, improve the overall application quality, and ensure that the application is always tested and ready for release.

Automate as much as possible

Another important principle of agile testing is utilizing automated tests. Automated tests allow developers to find defects quickly and efficiently by speeding up the testing process.

This will help in ensuring that the application meets the desired functionality and performance requirements. Utilizing automation enables testers to save their time and effort, and concentrate on other important tasks. Depending on the domain and context automated tests can be created using various frameworks and tools. For instance, in web development, frameworks like Selenium or Cypress can be used to automate the tests, while for mobile app development, teams can utilize tools like Appium.

Collaborate early and often

Close collaboration with the development team and other stakeholders is another key aspect of agile testing because it cannot be performed single-handedly; all team members are responsible for ensuring quality.

Therefore, to effectively apply agile testing principles and practices across different domains or contexts agile teams should work closely together. It requires the involvement of stakeholders, developers, testers, as well as end-users, to define clear and concise user stories and acceptance criteria.

Collaborating effectively throughout the development lifecycle, sharing knowledge, providing feedback, and resolving issues as they arise may help teams gain a better understanding of the need for assigned tasks and ensure that everyone is putting their effort into the same goal and aligns with expectations of the testing process.

Understanding the domain and context

Another important principle of agile testing is understanding the domain and context, because testing techniques may differ depending on the domains and contexts.

For instance, in safety-critical domains like healthcare applications, test teams need to follow strict regulatory measures and perform comprehensive testing to ensure their safety and reliability. Whereas, in the domain of social media like e-commerce applications, teams need to focus more on usability and performance testing.

Therefore understanding the domain and context before testing is important so that teams can tailor their testing efforts to meet the specific testing needs. Additionally, this will help the team in aligning the testing strategy, goals, scope, techniques, and tools with the specific needs and expectations of the application.

Adaptability to change

Another core principle of agile testing is adaptability to change. Being adaptable and flexible to changing requirements, feedback, and contexts helps teams tailor their testing efforts to meet the specific needs of the domain and context. Adapting to change, also ensures that the testing is relevant, effective, and efficient.

Test early and often

Another important principle of agile testing is to test early and often. This means the team should embrace an iterative and incremental approach to testing, conduct frequent and regular testing cycles to provide fast feedback and identify any issues or defects early on. Testing early and often can help them detect and fix defects quickly, reduce rework, and deliver value faster.

They also must ensure that the application is tested at different levels, such as unit, integration, system, and acceptance, by using various techniques, including exploratory, scripted, automated, and performance testing.

Automate agile testing using LambdaTest

Agile testing is a fast-paced, iterative process that emphasizes speed, and flexibility. In agile testing, teams constantly make changes and move quickly as they have no time to waste and every aspect of the application must be tested thoroughly. This can be a daunting task, but it is possible to master the agile testing process by choosing the right automation tool.

Automation tools allow the automatic creation of reusable test scripts that can be used to perform testing more comprehensively through testing repetitive steps with different data sets, such as in case of cross-browser or cross-device compatibility. Automated tests can also be run regularly to provide continuous feedback about overall application quality, preferably through a continuous integration approach.

Selecting the right framework plays a key role in the success of the agile testing process and achieving all its benefits. LambdaTest is an automation testing platform that allows automating the agile testing process easily. It enables testers to quickly create and execute test cases. Utilizing this platform they can also track and reduce defects efficiently and manage their team’s progress more easily.

LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that enables performing both manual and automated tests at scale. The platform also allows performing both real-time interactive testing and automation testing on more than 3000 environments, real mobile devices, and browsers for instant, on-demand testing. This enables ease in automation testing, cross-browser testing, and cross-device testing for websites and web apps.

Agile implements automation testing using various tools and frameworks, including Selenium, Cypress, and Appium. LambdaTest has inbuilt support for these frameworks which allows automating web and mobile app development processes. LambdaTest also facilitates instant and hassle-free parallelization.

With the help of this parallel execution capability testers can execute several automated tests parallely to accelerate their release cycles, easily identify potential issues, streamline testing procedures, and provide users with high-quality experiences.

CI/CD allows automating code transitions from development to testing and deployment. LambdaTest can be seamlessly integrated with popular CI/CD solutions such as Jenkins, Travis CI, TeamCity, Bamboo, CircleCI, and Azure Pipelines, enabling developers and testers to carry out testing procedures that follow agile methodology.

Its built-in debugging tools let testers track, identify, and resolve bugs instantly. Additionally, LambdaTest helps the team achieve agile goals by overcoming Agile challenges like insufficient test coverage, slower feedback, deferring important tests, etc.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be said that the key to success in agile testing is focusing on quality. To apply the agile testing principles and practices across different domains and contexts the team needs to use a combination of continuous integration, automated testing, collaboration, and adaptability.

By following the above principles and practices, the test team will be able to test effectively and deliver a quality result faster that meets the desired functionality and performance requirements. No matter whether developers are developing a web application, or a mobile app, embracing agile testing enables them to reap all the benefits of an agile testing workflow and bring success in their application development process.

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