How will Agile Testing bring value for Enterprise Applications in 2019?

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In today’s rapidly growing data driven world of business, enterprises need to step up their game by leveraging cutting edge applications, technologies and systems. To stay a step ahead of the competition, enterprises should be able to tackle challenges and meet emerging customer needs. The challenges could be in the form of new security scares, implementation of new technologies/paradigms, or the changing dynamics of user preferences. To meet these challenges, enterprises should be agile, efficient, scalable, flexible, and innovative by leveraging enterprise applications. However, before we delve into how agile testing can add value to enterprise applications in the year 2019, let us understand what these are all about.

What are enterprise applications?

These applications cater to the needs of enterprises in terms of augmenting productivity, cutting down redundancies, enhancing efficiency, and bolstering the customer feedback mechanism among others. These complex and mission critical applications are distributed and component based that can be scaled up (or down) based on the business requirements. The five characteristics of enterprise applications are:

• Scalable to meet the expected growth in users.
• Flexible to support new features, functionalities or modules.
• Robust enough to function seamlessly without glitches.
• Built-in security features to thwart the ingress of any malware. Moreover, the security should be reviewed on a continuous basis throughout the application lifecycle.

In order to ensure the above characteristics hold good and the applications meet their stated business objectives, these should undergo rigorous agile testing. So, why should testers forsake the traditional waterfall model of testing and opt for agile software testing?

Shortcomings of traditional waterfall testing

The modus operandi of building an enterprise application or any application for that matter is ideation and designing followed by development, integration, testing, deployment and maintenance. Since the process is sequential where each stage does not begin working until the previous stage has given a sign off, QA testers are able to test the components quite late in the SDLC. Thus, any glitch found becomes difficult, time consuming, and costly to be removed.

Moreover, there is little interaction between the testers and developers as both work in their respective silos and don’t want to venture into each other’s territory. Often testers wait for their turn to run a set of pre-determined tests to decide if the software needs to be passed ahead or sent back. Since the testing is not comprehensive and often lacks precision, the software is not fully quality compliant. As a result, customers must bear the brunt of operating a glitch prone application and the business reaping the bitter harvest of losing customers. To address these challenges, agile testing is increasingly being used by the QA team.

What is an agile testing approach?

The agile testing approach has shorter iterations and is better placed to identify errors and correcting them. In fact, at the beginning of the designing phase, the development and testing teams are placed in ‘sprints’ meant to achieve a particular objective. In the fast-changing dynamics of business today where enterprise applications function as the eyes and ears of stakeholders, it is only the agile testing services that can add value and deliver quality.

Advantages of using agile testing services

Fulfils the objectives of digital transformation initiatives: Digital transformation envisages the implementation of digital technologies to boost productivity, reduce turnarounds, enhance efficiency, augment capacities, and quicken the customer response mechanism. The agile testing services help to achieve these goals by allowing updation, maintenance, and testing of applications in real time. These help enterprises to deliver value and an enhanced experience to the users.

Aids continuous testing: Since the enterprise applications are run across platforms, devices, and networks, they should be tested continuously. This ensures the identification and mitigation of glitches or/and compliance and regulatory issues swiftly. The agile testing experts carry out necessary changes in the applications based on customer feedback on a continuous basis.

Swift turnarounds: Since glitches are identified and mitigated in real time and the development and testing teams are in constant communication, the development, integration, and delivery of software occur fast. Furthermore, there is little wastage of time when it comes to understanding the requirements and executing the specific activity in pursuance of testing.

Better communication: In the agile software testing process, the development and testing teams work in sprints. The moment the code of a module is written, it is passed on to the testing team within the sprint. If any glitch is found the same is removed and the code is passed on to the next sprint. Here, there is a greater cohesion between the teams leading to transparency, collaboration, and sharing of responsibilities. In fact, code development becomes a joint responsibility.

Facilitate and incorporate continuous feedback: The agile testing experts, besides testing the application continuously, facilitate the receipt and analysis of feedback from the end users. The feedback is taken into consideration to develop a quality compliant product.

Role of automation: One of the shortcomings of the waterfall model of testing is its overdependence on manual testing. This often leads testers to shun repetitive processes thereby missing out on testing many features and functionalities of the applications. The agile model of development and testing incorporates automation to validate the codes. It helps in executing tests such as performance, regression, usability etc. Also, by generating any number of virtual users, testers can validate features (and functionalities) across geographies, devices, platforms, and networks.

Conclusion

The agile testing strategy streamlines the development, testing and delivery of applications. Since the robust functioning of enterprise applications depends on myriad digital touchpoints and APIs, they should be validated for quality. Agile enhances the testing methodology and ensures glitches are identified and removed at the earliest.

Check out this Agile Testing White Paper to explore how Agile Software Testing metrics helps organizations deliver better software in a timely manner.