4 Critical Things to Consider for Agile Test Automation

Agile development and automated testing are two different paths altogether, but they have given birth to a term ‘agile test automation’.

Today, with more and more companies shifting towards agile development processes, they are depending on test automation to improve their application in the development and save on the time required for testing.

Even though agile test automation offers many benefits over traditional software testing models, it does require detailed planning and considerations to make it work. Here are four key things you should keep in mind while doing the agile test automation :

1. Identifying and Implementing the Right Automation Tool

Today, there is no shortage of automating testing tools in the market and identifying the right tool for your automation is the first step. Here are a few pointers to keep in mind while selecting the tool:

Selecting OS friendly automating tool – It allows your team to perform testing across various operating systems.

User-friendly architecture – The tool should have a user-friendly architecture. It means anyone from your team apart from the tester should be able to handle it, whenever the need arises. Today, you will find certain testing tools with codeless architecture that makes the task easier for testers.

Budget friendly – The testing tool that you select should fit into your budget and perform in the desired manner.

Instant report generation – The testing automation tool should be able to generate quick reports, so that it can be delivered to the development team.

2. Start Automation Side by Side

In agile application development, there are rapid changes and usually the team performs under pressure to complete the project on time. They tend to miss on quality and small functionalities. It is recommended to start automated testing side by side to avoid wastage of time and maintaining quality in each stage of development.

3. Giving Importance to Regression Testing
Automated testing scripts should be developed in such a way that they meet the requirements of regression testing concepts. In short, the automated tests should meet the criteria: maintenance, versioning, accuracy, performance, portability and integrity. It should minimize the time taken for testing and offer benefits in the form of speed, accuracy and performance.

4. Understand Development Environment
Many application developers work with a misconception that agile application development is a program-centric environment, where they have to iterate the programs to meet changing requirements of the application. They fail to understand that application development is a collective approach, seeking contributions from various factors such as networks, the backend data, database, external devices, etc. Many times when bugs appear, the team may not know where to look and they end up wasting time to understand the root cause of the problem. Hence it is very important to impart the knowledge of the development environment to the team, so that they reap maximum benefits from automated testing, rather than wasting attention and resources in identifying the defects or bugs.

Do you think agile test automation is the thing for you, but unsure how to approach it? Cigniti delivers agile test automation suites that are tailored to suit your development requirements and helps to identify defects and ensures reliability of the applications from the development phase.