Agile software development has become the new age golden standard in the IT arena. Popular for its flexible and dynamic approach, Agile methodology is focused on capabilities like adapting to changes, teamwork, consistent deliveries, and customer satisfaction.

However, amidst all the modern priorities, a critical aspect of software development often gets ignored. It doesn't matter how efficient or clean your code looks, you would always have to implement effective software testing services to ensure its success.

Here, in this post, we will take a look at the concept of agile testing, and how a top software testing company leverages various strategies to check the quality of your code. Following the best practices for these agile testing strategies will help you prepare your development process for success.

Agile Testing and its Principles

Agile testing is an integral aspect of Agile development methodology. But unlike conventional testing approaches, agile testing is directly integrated into the development stage instead of providing a separate stage for the testing and QA procedures. Adapting such an approach would help you identify the issues very early on and will help facilitate a seamless development process.

Agile testing principles are as mentioned below:

Continuous Testing: Agile testing is conducted continuously through the development stage after every iteration.
Team Involvement: Testing in Agile is not just up to QA experts. Every team member needs to be involved in the process.
Feedback and Improvement: The project progresses rapidly towards success as the improvements are made in response to the feedback from agile testing.

In the traditional form of development, coding comes first and after that tests are done. But with Agile methodology in the play, both coding and testing run parallely. Such an intertwined and continuous process reduces errors, allows rapid changes, and ensures that the functioning of the final product aligns with the needs of the users.

Top Agile Testing Methodologies

The dynamic nature of agile development demands your testing strategies to be robust and adaptable. Agile testing strategies enable effective communication, swift error detection and quality assurance with users’ needs as the top priority.

Test-driven Development (TDD)

TDD approach acts as a safety net for your source code. Here, you understand the requirements and then write the test before even writing the code for a function it's supposed to test. After that, you sit down to write that function with a mindset to make its code passable.

With the implementation of the TDD strategy, developers are encouraged to write simple and clear code. However, you need some time in the beginning to really get going with this testing approach. Therefore, the initial development speed might be slower.

Behavior-driven Development (BDD)

Behavior-driven development appeals to the behavior of the users. In this approach, an outline is prepared on how a feature should work before writing its code. The steps involved in this testing strategy are writing user stories, creating tests, and at the end: coding.

To deliver better outcomes, you need to integrate business and technology properly and applying BDD approach can make it work well. It enables the involved parties to understand the app and its features as well as enhances collaboration.

But it demands clear communication and a lot of work upfront.

Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD)

ATDD is an advanced version of the TDD strategy. In this approach, you will start by defining the acceptance criteria for a feature of your software. Here, everyone including the stakeholders, developers, and testers would collaborate to write the test. Such tests guide the software development process.

Implementing the ATDD strategy would ensure that everyone is on the same page and has a clear picture of what their end product would look and work like. On the downside, this testing strategy demands a significant investment of time and a clear emphasis on testing.

Continuous Testing

Continuous testing means more testing throughout your software lifecycle. Such a strategy is more useful with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps. It allows for quick feedback and swift error resolution. Implementing this strategy means working in an environment of testing and QA. However, it is quite difficult to maintain.

Crafting an Agile Testing Strategy

Now that we are clear on agile testing and different types of testing strategies, it's time to level up and discuss how you can build an agile testing strategy for your project. You have to adopt the approaches we discussed above and improvise or customize them to fulfill your project requirements.

Communicate and Collaborate

In agile testing, communication and collaboration are a must. For its success, the developers and testers need to work together consistently. The testers would also have to work closely with the end users to be able to understand their expectations of the end product.

The team must also have knowledge about every aspect of the testing and development process that would help them build a product, and end users' needs. Agile testing is the way to ensure that it happens.

Prioritize Test Cases

In the early stages of the development process, developers are often seen prioritizing certain requirements or features of the software. Similarly, they should also prioritize the important test cases in those initial stages.

The testers have to collaborate with the developers and analysts to build relevant test cases. As the development process progresses, testers should often revisit their priorities to make sure that their objectives are fulfilled and that they understand what tasks lay ahead next on the road.

Automate

Automation can come in handy for the testing team. You can set your system to prepare and run test cases automatically simultaneously to the app development.

Test automation won't only help you catch bugs and issues that might have been otherwise missed in manual testing but they also help save valuable time and resources.

Integrating the Tests with an Agile Workflow

It is the user stories that drive agile development. Therefore, you have to integrate these stories with the test cases to make sure that the developed feature works as per user expectations. When you integrate the testing into agile development, you prioritize the quality of the product as well as streamline the entire process.

However, to get better outcomes, you have to ensure that the tests are conducted every time a new piece of code is ready or revisions are made to an existing one. Such a proactive approach to testing enables you to detect issues early on, prevents backlogs from getting piled on, and keeps the agile sprint on track.

Agile Testing Best Practices

To ensure the implementation of your agile testing stays smooth and effective, you need to follow certain best practices for agile testing. Here is a small list of practices that can certainly add value to your testing strategy and confirm your way to success in the agile testing journey.

Quality-First Mindset

Quality is not just the goal of agile testing, it's the process itself. It's the responsibility of every member of the team to ensure that whatever task they are assigned, will be delivered with top-notch quality. For that, they need to take accountability and adopt a quality-first mindset. It will help them elevate the quality of the final product.

Collaboration between Developers and Testers

The Agile development practices demand your testers and developers to work in collaboration. The culture of innovation will be fostered only when the developers and testers come together and share their insights and ideas. It is intended to fill the knowledge gaps in the team and speed up the problem-solving process.

Continuous Learning

In an agile world, you are either adapting to the changes to stay relevant or you don't keep up and get outdated. With continuous testing, you have to promote continuous learning as well. A new trend emerges every day in the technology arena. If you don't keep up, you are going to face setbacks and barriers on your development journey. But if you take the opportunity to learn and grow then you can evolve as well as deliver better results to your customers.

Embracing the Feedback

Agility means being ready and quick to adapt to changes. If your developed product does not work up to user expectations then your code, app architecture or development process should not come in the way of implementing necessary changes to the product to build it as the users want it to be.

Also, you should be quick to understand the feedback and implement the necessary changes. A user or customer would not like to keep waiting. More importantly, you would want to provide your customers with features and functionalities before they go out of trend or use.

Conclusion

In a fast-paced environment of agile software development, you are in dire need of effective testing strategies. Each strategy from TDD to continuous testing can play a critical role in driving your agile project to success.

The key here is to foster a quality-first mindset, encourage collaboration, promote continuous learning, embrace feedback and be quick about changes.

Agile Testing Strategies for Successful Software Development.