Agile Testing

There are mainly three roles that a Scrum team have:

☛ Project Owner – who has the responsibility of managing product backlog. Works with end users and customers and provide proper requirement to the team to build the proper product.

☛ Scrum Master – who works with scrum team to make sure each sprint gets complete on time. Scrum master ensure proper work flow to the team.

☛ Scrum Team – Each member in the team should be self-organized, dedicated and responsible for high quality of the work.

Agile Testing is a practice that a QA follows in a dynamic environment where testing requirements keep changing according to the customer needs. It is done parallel to the development activity where testing team receives frequent small codes from the development team for testing.

Software is developed and delivered to customer and based on the feedback again developed in cycles or release and sprints. Say in Release 1 software is developed in 5 sprints and delivered to customer. Now customer wants some changes, then development team plan for 2nd release which can be completed in some sprints and so on.

It is Test-first development technique in which we add a test first before we write a complete production code. Next we run the test and based on the result refactor the code to fulfill the test requirement.

Daily stand up meeting is essential for any team in which-

☛ Team discuss about how much work has been completed.

☛ What are the plans to resolve technical issues.

☛ What steps need to done to complete the projects etc.

Re-factoring is modifying existing code to improve its performance, readability, extensibility etc. The code’s functionality remains as it is.

A small code which mimics a specific component in the system and can replace it. Its output is same as the component it replaces.

While working on Agile projects you can use tools like

☛ BugDigger

☛ BugShooting

☛ qTrace

☛ Snagit

☛ Bonfire

☛ Usersnap

Sprint is a predefined interval or the time frame in which the work has to be completed and make it ready for review or ready for production deployment. This time box usually lies between 2 weeks to 1 month. In our day to day life when we say that we follow 1 month Sprint cycle, it simply means that we work for one month on the tasks and make it ready for review by the end of that month.

Scrum ban is a software development model based on Scrum and Kanban. It is specially designed for project that requires frequent maintenance, having unexpected user stories and programming errors. Using these approach, the team’s workflow is guided in a way that allows minimum completion time for each user story or programming error.

• In case of some software deliverables, especially the large ones, it is difficult to assess the effort required at the beginning of the software development life cycle.

• There is lack of emphasis on necessary designing and documentation.

• The project can easily get taken off track if the customer representative is not clear what final outcome that they want.

• Only senior programmers are capable of taking the kind of decisions required during the development process. Hence it has no place for newbie programmers, unless combined with experienced resources.

Software is development in parts or increments. In each increment a portion of the complete requirement is delivered.

It is a software development model which is combination of scrum and kanban. Scrumban is considered for maintenance projects in which there are frequent changes or unexpected user stories. It can reduce the minimum completion time for user stories.

To improve the performance, the existing code is modified; this is re-factoring. During re-factoring the code functionality remains same

The primary testing activities during Agile is automated unit testing and exploratory testing.

Though, depending on project requirements, a tester may execute Functional and Non-functional tests on the Application Under Test (AUT).

Challenges involved in Agile Software development includes

☛ It requires more testing and customers involvement

☛ It impacts management more than developers

☛ Each feature needs to be completed before moving on to the next

☛ All the code has to work fine to ensure application is in working state

☛ More planning is required

The big difference is that in agile environment, testing is not a phase, it is an activity parallel to development.

☛ In agile environment, small features of software are delivered frequently, so testing activity should be parallel to development activity. Testing time is short as we are only testing small features.

☛ In the waterfall model, there is a testing phase at the end of the development so, testing is a big effort done after the whole application is developed. Testing time is long as we have to test the whole application.

The Scrum team consists of three main roles:

• Product Owner: Manages the product backlog. PO is the voice of the business and create new features to be developed for the application.

• Scrum Master: Responsible for managing the sprint, remove any impediments and keeps track of the progress of the project.

• Scrum Team itself: Composed of developers, designers and QA. This forms the team which is responsible for delivering high quality software.

QA can add a lot of value to an agile team because of the different mindset. Testers can and should think about the different possible scenarios to test a story. However the most important asset that they can bring is:

• To prevent defect:QA should advocate best practices along the way to prevent defects from entering the system in the first place.

• To provide fast feedback: It is important for developers to know if the new functionality works as expected and if regression tests pass, and they need that feedback quite quickly. QA should provide the results of the tests to developers as soon as possible.

A test stub is a bit of code that replaces an undeveloped or fully developed component within a system being tested. The test stub is built such that it mimics the actual component by generating specific known outputs. The stub can be used as a substitute for the actual (fully developed) component for testing purposes. The stub can also be used during testing to isolate system components and troubleshoot problems. A test stub is also known as a test double.