Organizations globally are adopting the Agile development methodology for enhanced collaboration and faster delivery. Agile is a set of software development principles that lays emphasis on individuals over processes and tools, working software over documentation, collaboration over contracts and responding to change over following the plan. Through Agile, organizations can collaborate with their customers by delivering live and working software to them. Despite its benefits, embracing Agile in the Testing practice is not an easy task and fraught with challenges.

Challenges in adopting Agile in Testing

While selecting appropriate tools that are usable as well as flexible is an issue, encouraging the entire team to contribute towards the tests is another problem. Enabling open-source integration and promoting test-driven development are some of the other concern areas in Agile testing.

Agile also brings with itself a few technical problems like difficulties on account of distributed teams and obstacles faced by individual testers within the Agile team. In the case of Agile development methodology, it often becomes tough to keep track of the number and speed of changes in user stories, requirements or the code.

Another issue with Agile is frequently changing requirements. Due to this, the code is refactored quite often.  Agile testing can be further bogged down by the fact that the testing team has to continuously collaborate with other cross-functional and geographically scattered teams.

How Test Automation can help

Test Automation can help organizations resolve the challenges associated with Agile testing.  Test Automation ensures that the application is and continues to be in a good shape with each new sprint. It encourages the Agile development team to collaborate with the testing team, seeing it as a  partner, rather than as Quality Police. Running the tests over and over again gives the development team an assurance that the new code, which was added to the system, does not break or destabilize anything.  It also certifies that the system is working and the new code is doing what it is supposed to do. As Agile teams need to test continuously, Test Automation provides the required speed, and helps ascertain that the feature implemented during a given iteration or sprint is actually deployed.

Think, before starting

Overall, Test Automation is useful in addressing and fulfilling critical testing demands and essential for Agile projects due to their need for frequent regression testing. At the same time, while Test Automation may be needed, just deploying an automation tool is not the solution for an organization.  What companies also need is a proven automation testing strategy and a skilled test team. This involves designing an effective automation solution that supports quicker maintenance, faster ramp-up time and distributed ownership.

Do look at Jim’s comments to complete reading

Testing is one such area that is making testing teams lose their sleep.

One of my friend and colleague, Garima Mishra, has prepared a 40 mins webinar that aims to showcase how testing teams can  get benefited by Automation and how it can help address the challenges that are usually encountered while testing time-boxed agile projects.

The webinar is scheduled on Nov 30, 2011 at 10 am PT / 1 pm ET

Register to learn more.

If you want to learn and understand about cloud and its usefulness in testing, do register yourself at http://www.impetus.com/webinar?eventid=43

This session will be full of practical information that can be utilized by the testing teams while deciding to harness the capabilities of Cloud.

See you all at 10 AM PST / 1 PM EST / 10:30 PM IST tomorrow.

Whenever we think of Agile, we think about Automation. It has been seen that whenever a discussion on automation comes up in Agile teams, they often start discussing the starting point or the challenges that will be faced for achieving the automation.

I will be talking about “Agiltomation” during our 5th NCR testers monthly meet scheduled for tomorrow. In case you are not attending, I will be posting a blog post soon on the subject.

Stay tuned!

In this post, I would be focusing on the steps that companies can take to avoid the pitfalls of the 3 M’s, ensuring complete coordination and cooperation between all the teams, hitherto working in silos. In simple words the solution is as simple as binding these different teams together, so that they think as one and work as one. By eliminating the barriers between the teams, aligning their different and distinctive working styles and unifying them in a single environment, it is possible to beat the bottlenecks.

The three challenges, need three solutions, or should I say, three simple steps.

Step 1 - identify the Tools and Frameworks that are used by the project teams on a recurring basis. There is also need to figure out the various Frameworks that are being used either to develop or test the applications.

Step 2 - Identify the Practices that are followed by the team at each phase of the development and testing process and further segregate the Tools and Practices based on their areas of usage.

Step 3 is to rightly blend the tools and practices that have been identified in step 1 and 2; and integrate the same, bring them together.

The three steps make it possible to understand how the practices are linking up with each other using various Tools and Frameworks. By rightly blending the Tools and Practices that have been identified in Steps 1 and 2, and bringing them together, companies can reduce various ambiguities that remain in the teams while performing testing.

It is also possible to develop a platform that integrates the tools and activities performed during development and testing. This platform can help in synchronizing the tasks, finally leading to productive testing. Furthermore, this platform can be made generic so that the teams do not need to change or replace the tools to enjoy its benefits.

Do let me know what in your view the solution to the 3M’s conundrum is, and how you have managed to overcome these challenges on your own turf.

We have already implemented this in the two NCRTMM and attendees have found it beneficial. The testers  have utilized this space to resolve the problems that they face in their live projects.

This post of mine will provide the complete details about “Problem on the table”.

What is “Problem on the table”
“Problem on the table” defines a space that allows group of testers to interact in a simple and organized way to enable valuable dialogs that addresses the day to day issues that they get stuck with and want some expert help to get them resolved. This space encourages people to discuss and resolve the issues and be more productive within their organizations.

Fundamental Rules

• No one will control your discussions
• Whoever wants to provide help is the right person
• Allow owner of the problem to steer his or her topic in the right direction
• Always thank individuals whose suggestions have actually helped you

How “Problem on the table” works?

• Come up with some interesting problem area that you would like to discuss during any NCR Testers meet to ITB NCR Chapter with as much detail as possible.
• After receiving an email from your side, there will be a space allocated during the meet to discuss about your “Problem”.
• Anyone attending the meet is free to walk to the designated area for your listed “problem” and provide their frank suggestions.
• It is upto the owner how they would like to steer the discussion.
• At the end of the session, the owner of the “problem” needs to present their “problem area” alongwith the best solution, that fits in their context using a defined template.

Benefits of owning “Problem on the table” session?

• You manage and define your own agenda
• As most of the test experts from the industry are joining the NCR Testers Meet, there is a high probability that you will be able to find the answer to trivial issues that remain unanswered elsewhere.

Most of the time, the solution they are looking for is dependent on the amount of collaboration that exists in their teams. In order to develop better, more relevant products for the target markets, one must ensure that all the stakeholders within the product development eco-system should work together. It is the unity, collaboration, cooperation and team work that work wonders when it comes to creating products that wow customers. Now the question comes… who all constitute the product development eco-system? Well, if we look at the broader level, they are business stakeholders, developers and the testers.

In fact, team collaboration wins hands down when one is discussing the most important factor responsible for successful product development i.e. Testing. This team play has to take place across the product life cycle—from the time the product is conceptualized, to the time when it is finally delivered to customer. As the saying goes, “It is not a question of how well each process works, but how well they all work together!”

In my experience, absence of team collaboration results in poor testing and reduced productivity and efficiency that have a spiraling impact on the product quality that is finally delivered to the customer.

In general, there are three factors that can make or break a product. As long as product teams can overcome these three challenges, they can deliver products that confirm to international standards and exceed the expectations of their users. These factors are what I call the 3 M’s: Miscommunication, Misinterpretation and Misconception.

These factors together can result in huge losses to the enterprise. As per Forrester Research, poorly defined applications contribute to 66 percent of the project failure rate, costing US businesses a whopping USD 30 billion every year!

If the business stakeholders, development and testing teams share information that is clear, concise and represents exactly what is expected from each other, the first lacuna of Miscommunication can be overcome.

By providing sufficient facts and data to back what needs to be done, the teams can also deal with the Misinterpretation.

The third factor, Misconception is about a mistaken thought, idea, or notion that creates discontent. It can be overcome by avoiding unnecessary metrics to avoid false impression that are generated during the project.

As of now I would recommend to watch out for the 3 M’s while working in your respective teams that can save considerable efforts and resources during any product development life cycle.

In my next post I will be talking about three basic Steps that can help you effectively manage/sync-up these 3 M’s. Stay tuned!

Testing team is often involved very late in the PDLC. The product management team also collates frequently changing customer requirements and market expectations of a product, while also contributing to the product roadmap. As a result, the scope of the product changes constantly and testing becomes complicated with daily builds involved.

It is important to design the test strategy early along with the product roadmap so that everyone knows what all will be needed to test and what all methodologies will be applied during the process. This will enable the test owner to define the right budget for the testing cycle and get the necessary approvals on time.

There is a wide range of testing methods and testing techniques currently in use that serve multiple purposes in different life cycle phases. Team should choose the testing programs best suited to their needs.

Additionally, team must also focus on the cost element when identifying and evaluating testing tools available in the market. By picking Open Source tools, organizations can cut capital expenditure. At the same time, automated testing tools can also allow companies to undertake cheaper regression testing. Automation is again a debatable approach, might be I will share more thoughts on this in my upcoming posts.

It is also important to prioritize the test areas based on business criticality and test coverage. A test metric driven report also helps in getting the visibility into the exact team/product status from time to time. This enables management to take a decision regarding the market release of the product.

When examining the outsourcing option, companies must explore and clearly differentiate on what part of testing can be done onsite and what to outsource, while optimally using the collaboration tools. If there are questions of who is doing what, setup a transparent system in order to track each remote team member of the test team.

Currently I am busy designing a test solution that will act as a SINGLE solution to overcome all the challenges in software product testing space. It might be too early to talk about it or maybe you will need to wait for few more days before I start detailing about it in my blog posts.

Today, when I relook at that separation, it sounds dangerous. But it has been the case in many organizations even lately. As it has been sometime since we started working on a platform that will help bridge this gap between developer and tester, I thought of sharing the idea in a webinar and how developer and tester can work more closely without any communication overhead. The webinar is scheduled on 17th Sep, 2010 at 10:00 AM PST. This webinar should give a fair idea on how you can develop your own solution that can bring both the teams together and make them work to achieve organization goals.

Register for this webinar at http://www.impetus.com/webinar?eventid=26