Sunday, 6 October 2013

Introduction to Agile Testing:-
While the given application under test is still evolving depending upon the customer needs, the mindset of the end user and the current market condition, it is highly impractical to go for the usual standard SDLC Models like Water Fall, V&V Model etc. Such models are most suitable for the Applications that are stable and non-volatile. The concept of “Time-To-Market” is the key word in today’s IT Business that compels the Software vendors to come up with new strategies to save the time, resources, cut down the cost involved and at the same time, deliver a reliable product that meets the user requirements. In this case, a reasonably good amount of end-to-end testing is carried out and the product could be acceptable with known issues/defects at the end of an intermediate release. These defects are harmless for the Application usability.
To adopt such a process in a systematic way, we have a new concept called Agile Methodology. This methodology continuously strives to overcome the issues of dynamically changing requirements while still trying to maintain a well-defined process.
The process is as follows:
1. The Customer prepares the Business Requirements and the Business Analyst or the Engineering team reviews it. Ideally, the Quality Assurance/Testing team is also involved in reviewing these requirements in order to be able to plan further stages accordingly.
2. During the Design and Implementation stages, the Engineering team writes User Stories and the analysis of issues at various stages. The Customer reviews these on regular basis and updates the Requirement specifications accordingly. The Testing team would follow up on regular basis at every stage until a consolidated documentation is prepared. This is to ensure that the Customer, the Engineering team and the Testing team are at the same page always and thus ensuring complete test coverage.
3. While the Engineering team starts the implementation, the Testing team starts with test planning, test strategies and test cases preparation. These would be properly documented and handed over to the Customer and the Engineering team for review. This is to ensure the complete test coverage and avoid unnecessary or redundant test cases.
4. As and when the Developer implements the code, the Testing team identifies if the application can be built using this code for a quick testing. This is to identify the defects at the early stage so that the developer can fix them in the next round on priority basis and continue with further development. This iteration continues until the end of the code implementation. Once the testing cycle starts, the Test team can now focus more on major test items such as Integration, Usability Testing and System Testing etc.
 

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