Why Automation Testing Is Important In Agile Development?

So Where Does Automation Testing Fit In Agile Development?

To fulfil the needs for fast deployment, testing methods need to be faster. To understand this, let's take an example of an application developed. Consider that a gaming application is being developed. In the first build, the game is deployed into the market. Now with every update new features are added to the application. So the gaming application will be continuously deployed with every new feature being tested along with the existing features. With so many features it becomes almost impossible to test every feature manually. This is where automation in testing comes into picture.

Automation testing can solve your problem for fast testing methods if proper tools are used in an effective manner. There are various tools that are available for automation testing process such as: Selenium, TestNG, Appium, Cucumber, Test Studio, etc. These tools require a test case to be developed according to the needs of application/software to be tested. These test cases can then be run multiple times while performing continuous builds. This ensures that every step being taken is bug free or if a bug is introduced then it becomes easy to identify at what stage it has entered into our program. Before you commit to this shift, it helps to weigh the time and cost saved against the setup effort using this test automation ROI calculator.

Agile teams now split the automated suite by how long each layer takes to run. Unit and component tests run on every commit and finish in minutes, so a developer sees a failure before moving on to the next story. API and integration tests run on the pull request. The full cross-browser regression suite runs on a schedule or ahead of a release, because it is the slowest layer to execute. This split keeps sprint feedback fast without cutting coverage, and it tells the team which failures must block a merge and which ones can be triaged later.

Ownership of the suite is shared rather than handed to a separate team at the end of the sprint. Developers write the unit tests that cover the code they just wrote, testers own the integration and end-to-end layers, and a story is not counted as done until the automated checks for it exist and pass. Keeping that rule in the definition of done is what stops an automation backlog from building up across sprints.

When should you apply Automation Testing in Agile Development?

Agile test automation optimizes Agile projects by automating recurring tests, leading to faster feedback. Seamlessly integrated into the Agile cycle, it enhances software quality, minimizes manual errors, and speeds up product releases. As a foundational aspect of Agile, it emphasizes continuous delivery and integration.

• If a single test case is to be tested repeatedly.
• If your test cases are very tedious and time-consuming.
• If you have to run the test cases with different data and conditions several times
• If you a similar test suite that needs to be executed for different user sets.
• If you have got a narrow release window, and saving time is your top priority.
• When test cases need to be executed with various browsers and environments

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Things That Make Agile Developer's Life Difficult

An agile tester may face various challenges. Some of them are listed below which can be overcome by using proper testing methods

Detection of defects at an early stage:

It becomes easier and cheaper to fix a defect if it is detected at an early stage but in case the defect is found at the later stages of development cycle it becomes more expensive and difficult to fix it. So there are two solutions to this problem: you can do subsequent code reviews or run static analysis tools on source code. These ancillary tools to Automation Testing are aimed at finding missing routines, enforce coding standards , coding standard deviations and errors that can crop up in production due to mismatch data types.

Inadequate API testing:

API testing requires an advanced knowledge of coding because of the complexities associated with the test code. So this is because many a times it may be possible that your API is not tested properly. To ensure this, there are many testing tools available to check the functionality of APIs without the need of strong coding skills so that your services are fully tested.

Inadequate test coverage:

Sometimes you miss out the critical tests for any requirements because of continuous integration and the changing requirements associated with the service. Another cause to miss out the test coverage can be the unanticipated changes being made into the code. So as to make sure that all the changed codes were tested, source code analysis needs to be done to identify the modules that were changed.

Broken code due to frequent builds:

As the code is changed and compiled daily, the existing features being affected by the code becomes more frequent. For this every time the code is changed it needs to be compiled and tested. Because of resources constraint it becomes difficult to perform this daily so the testers need to run automated cross browser testing to do so.

Performance bottlenecks:

With addition of more and more features, the complexity of code also increases.Performance issues will be faced if the developer loses track of how this is affecting the end user performance. So you need to identify which parts of the code are creating problems and how the performance is being affected with time due to these problems. Load and Automation Testing Tools can be utilized to check identify the slow areas and keep track of performance with time.