Agile Testing: A Quick Introduction and Why You Need It

In today’s market, agility is the key to success for organizations of all sizes and industries. It only makes sense then that agile testing is a necessity for organizations developing in an agile environment.

Development processes have received much attention over the last decade as over 93 percent of organizations use at least some agile development methodologies, according to with World Quality Report. Unfortunately, agile testing only came into existence recently and quality assurance (QA) is still under-evolved in comparison to the development process.

Functionize, however, is the answer to the current QA dilemma; regardless if you’re running a company with 20 employees or a multibillion dollar organization with more than 100,000 employees. When we demo Functionize to companies that want to determine if agile testing is a reality for their organization, we hear a few things repeated over and over and they break up into two categories: visibility and efficiency.

Agile Testing Should Create Visibility

• We don't know how many tests we run.
• We don't know how many of our tests pass or fail.
• We have (insert low percentage) of our tests automated.

Not knowing how many tests run and/or pass and fail implies a severe lack of visibility into the testing process. According to the World Quality Report, testing and QA accounts for nearly 20 percent of the total IT budget -- and is increasing each year. This lack of visibility into a process that determines if your users have a continuously high quality experience each time they visit your site or app is a huge problem that needs to be addressed.

Efficiency is a Major Outcome of Agile Testing

• We can’t create test cases and testing environments fast enough to keep up with agile development.
• It’s hard to find and retain onshore or nearshore technical testing talent and when we do, it costs a lot of money and time.

Agile testing, for the most part, simply does not exist in organizations. Due to the lack of proper tools, businesses are unable to implement an effective testing and QA plan. According to the World Quality Report 61% of survey respondents have difficulty applying test automation at appropriate levels in agile development environments while 35% lack the availability of the right testing tools to build reusable test cases.

Testing and QA has been an unsexy topic for some time. In fact, search Google for testing tools and you’ll find a number of images that look like something out of a 1995 software horror story. The move to agile development and increased competition across all markets continues to increase pressure on testing and QA teams. Creating agile testing environments, while adding more visibility to the process, will be a key point in determining the success of a QA and testing teams.