Poonam Badave, Author at SpurQLabs | Software Testing Services | Test Automation Services

Role of Automated testing in Agile methodology

by Poonam Badave | Aug 10, 2023 | Blog

What are Agile methodologies?

Agile methodologies are nothing but an approach or practice that applies in Software development and Project management which makes the development process more efficient and helps to maintain the quality of software. It mainly focuses on collaboration, flexibility, and adaptability in the testing process. During development, the software testing practices adhere to the agile methodology.

There are several project management tools such as Kanban, Jira, Scrum, or Extreme Programming (XP).

The core process involved in Agile development:

Define Requirements:

The product owner or analyst along with the development team collaborates with each other and identifies, analyzes, and defines the requirements. User stories are created for specific sprints to define the requirements. And these user stories are collected in the product backlog or product board.

Sprint Planning:

Sprint planning is a process in which a product goal gets defined and a plan for the upcoming sprint is defined. Developers from the development team pick a set of requirements from the product board to work on the upcoming sprint. A Sprint meeting happens and the team identifies the scope of the upcoming sprint and breaks down the requirements into tasks.

Sprint Execution:

In Sprint Execution, the development team starts working on user stories in a time-bound iteration called a Sprint. Daily scrum call meetings are conducted to discuss progress, work, and any impediments during the sprint.

Continuously Integration:

Continuously Integration is a process, where developers make changes in code and those changes are also merged in a remote repository (GitHub) and tested frequently. It automates stages of the project pipeline such as – build, test, and deployment. It helps to team working within agile development.

Agile Testing:

Testing activity occurs in the early phase of the development process. In this phase, the tester collaborates with the developer and PO to understand the requirement and also starts testing the module, and defines the acceptance criteria. Testers start preparing test scenarios and test cases based on user stories. And they execute test cases and report bugs using bug-reporting tools such as Jira.

Incremental Delivery:

In the incremental Delivery phase, a small, developed part of the software is delivered to the customer at the end of each sprint. It helps to improve the quality of software by delivering it in small parts.

Sprint Review:

The Dev team, Pos, and QAs are involved in the Sprint Review meeting. In this phase, Sprint review takes place. Here development team presents work accomplished or gives a demo of whatever they have developed in that sprint. The incomplete issues, backlog adjustments, and Action items are discussed in this meeting.

Sprint Retrospective:

The agenda of this meeting is to examine how Sprint went as far as people, requirements, relationships, processes, and tools.

Discussions Include:

What did we do well?
What should we have done better?
Identifies area for improvement
Suggestions
Actions

Let’s talk about Automated Testing:

Automated testing is an Agile practice that allows you to automate test cases through automation tools and execute the test cases to verify the functionality of software applications to meet customer expectations. It is a key aspect of agile development. Automated testing emphasizes manual testing efforts and also provides a way for continuous testing, early bug detection, and quick feedback.

Important aspects of Automated Testing:

Test Automation Framework: The team creates an automation framework using specific technology as per requirement and maintains it. It is a structured set of a rule and resources and tools which helps to create, execute, and automated the test cases. It allows us to reuse the code, in test data and also provides a way to generate test results or reports for execution.
Continuous Integration: The automation tool makes continuous integration easier when developers make changes in code and those changes are merged in a remote repository (GitHub) and tested frequently. Automated testing is an integral part of this process.
Regression Testing: Automated testing plays a vital role in regression testing. It makes sure that there should not be any unintended side effects occurring in the module when new changes have been made. Automation regression tests can be executed fast and repeatedly, giving quick feedback.
Continuous Delivery and Deployment: Automated testing allows us to run test suites to ensure that the changes made meet functional expectations and maintain the effectiveness and quality of the product. After completion of the automated testing phase, there is a Continuous Delivery process in which changes are automatically continuously deployed to the staging environment for testing. With this process code, the changes are continuously updated with the latest changes which makes faster delivery of the product in an efficient way.

Benefits of Automated Testing in Agile Methodologies:

Faster Feedback: Automated testing provides feedback quickly. It also helps in executing tests, generating results, and finding issues very quickly in the development cycle.
Increased Coverage: Automated testing allows you to create a wider range of test scenarios and test cases compared to manual tests.
Consistency-It helps to keep consistency in the execution of test cases, reducing human errors. Automated code itself needs to be tested to makes sure consistency and high quality.
Time and Cost Efficiency: Automated testing reduces human efforts and it is used in repetitive tasks, so it saves time and resources in the long run.

The working of CI/CD for automation testing in Agile:

CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery as it is a pipeline that helps development teams to automate and makes it more efficient for building code, running tests, and also safely deploying code. The goal of the CI/CD method is to deploy code frequently and deliver working software to customers frequently and quickly.

Usually, Our source code is located on our local workstations. From there, we will commit our source code to the version control system, specifically using Git, which serves as our code management system, and is hosted on GitHub. Once the code is available in the code management system, the CI tool pulls that code automatically and builds under run unit test and then we call it Continuous integration.

During the CI process, we build and compile our source code and generate artifacts. Once these artifacts are generated, we need to deploy them on target env.

Target env may be changed based on the project necessities it may be a staging test, Dev or QA, preview, or production like various env we might have.

Now let’s take the artifacts we want to deploy on a staging environment.

Once it is deployed in the staging env we do the regression test and performance test. Once it successfully passes this test, it can be deployed to the production environment. During the deployment process, after the build, we move it into the staging environment, and if this transition to production can be achieved seamlessly without any manual intervention, we refer to it as Continuous Deployment.

In Continuous deployment, we can automatically deploy into the staging env and production environment.

Benefits of CI/CD:

Helps you to build better-quality software.
Automate the software release process for making delivery more efficient, rapid, and secure as well.
It helps you to automate repetitive tasks.
It reduces risks and makes the deployment process more predictable.
You can release software more frequently, which helps you to get fast feedback from your clients.
It gives a single view across all environments and applications.

What is Test Automation?

Test automation or automation testing is a process of automating test cases using automation tools and frameworks, managing test data, and asserting the automated result with requirements without any manual intervention. Automation testing plays an important role in achieving goals such as faster delivery, continuous integration, and frequent releases.

Benefits of Test Automation in Agile:

Faster Feedback: Automated tests can be executed quickly and also provide faster feedback on tests.

Improved Test Coverage: Automation tests allow running a large number of test cases across different environments hence it can cover different scenarios in the application.

Regression Testing Efficiency: Automation testing is mainly useful for running regression tests so it helps in repetitive testing after each code change.

Consistency and Accuracy: As automation testing is done without human intervention, it eliminates the possibility of human errors during test execution.

Benefits of Deployment Automation:

Deployment automation offers numerous benefits for software development, IT operations teams, and the entire organization. Automated deployment is a best practice in agile. Moreover, it allows developers to automate the deployment activities, development process, and testing activities. The following are the key benefits of deployment automation:

Faster and More Efficient Deployment: Automated deployment process is faster than manual deployment as it provides quick feedback. So that it reduces the time takes to release the software updates.
Consistency: Deployment automation ensures the consistency of the deployment across different environments (staging, dev, preview, production). So that it reduces the risk of configuration errors.
Reduce Human Errors: As Manual deployment involves humans which can lead to deployment errors, data loss, or other issues. So here, automation reduces such errors and increases the reliability of the deployment process.
Efficient Testing Environment: Automated deployment allows quick provisioning and teardown of the testing environment. This enables development and testing teams to work in isolation and concurrently, leading to faster testing cycles.
Cost Savings and Resource Optimization: Automated deployment reduces manual intervention which can lead to saving costs and resources.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, automated testing is an essential part of the dynamic landscape of the agile world. As we’ve explored this blog, it provides faster feedback, consistency, and accuracy, reducing risk and ensuring to delivery of high-quality software. Automation plays an important role in the form of CI/CD that helps you to build better-quality software.