Beyond Agile: Reorganizing It For Faster Software Delivery
Nearly 40 percent of software development companies cite hiring new talent as one of their biggest challenges. Having the right time is just the first step in making a software development firm successful. Adequately managing the team you have in place is an essential part of getting software built and deployed in a hurry.
For years, developers have used the Agile methodology to make building software easier and more efficient. The methodology uses concepts like collaboration and continuous delivery to make developers more productive.
Are you curious about how to make Agile work for your developers? If so, check out the helpful tips below.
Start By Providing Developers With the Right Tools
One of the biggest mistakes business owners usually make during a software development project is failing to provide their team with state-of-the-art tools. Trying to make your team write and test code on laptops is a bad idea. In order to succeed in the world of Agile, you need lots of quality hardware.
Providing your team with things like large monitors, powerful PCs, and ergonomically designed keyboards is a must. With these tools, you will be able to see a noticeable difference in how fast developers are able to work. High-quality tools can also help you keep developers happy, which can go a long way when trying to speed up the software building process.
Getting Results Should Be Your Main Priority
The cornerstone of any successful software development project is creating a results-driven environment. In the early days of Agile, companies created software by using the bottom-up methodology. Business owners quickly realized that getting results with this methodology is quite difficult.
Allowing upper management to set the parameters and goals of a project is essential. With this information, developers can figure out what they need to do to deliver results. Using project management software is important when attempting to track what developers are doing. If you notice that projects are not being completed on time, you need to find a way to nip this issue in the bud before it leads to bigger problems.
The Power of Continuous Delivery
Using the continuous delivery model throughout the software development process is also a good idea. Keeping your developers working at a constant pace can help you get these projects completed in a timely manner.
Having success with continuous delivery will require you to put an emphasis on testing throughout the development process. Failing to test every piece of a new program before it is deployed can lead to serious problems in the long run. By testing throughout the development process, you can provide users with a higher quality product.
While testing will take some time and effort, it is well worth the energy you invest. Using the Python logging can help your team discover errors with ease. Find out more about this practice by reading an insightful article to Python logging basics.
You Need to Use Automation From Day One
As any developer will tell you, building software requires a lot of repetitive tasks to be performed. One of the best ways to reduce the number of repetitive tasks your team has to perform during this process is by using automation.
There are tons of programs that allow developers to build templates that can be used during various stages of the software development process. While it may take a while to get used to this automation, it will be worth it in the long run.
Work on Reinventing Agile to Fit Your Needs
Constantly reviewing and optimizing the process used to develop new software is important. Taking an objective look at how developers are handling the tasks assigned to them can help you customize the Agile methodology to fit your business.
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Why you must automate functional testing of web application in 2019?
When you have a commercial web application, you are always challenged to remain competitive. You are constantly under pressure to roll out new features for your clients. While software developers have adopted agile methodologies to speed up software release cycles, this process can leave your web application vulnerable to bugs. In such a case, to what extent can you validate the reliability of all functionalities?I’ll share some of my experiences and examples to show you how automated tests are crucial to staying ahead of the competition.
Quick time-to-market earns customer loyalty
In my previous firm when we were looking for a team collaboration web app, we approached one of the solution providers. We liked their product but it needed some customization to suit our needs. They promised us a quick delivery.
On the delivery day, we had big smile on our faces. But as we ran the product all of us were left disappointed. The web app failed as it returned erroneous data when fetching information from other productivity apps. It was too buggy to be useful. The whole promise of delivering it first, delivering it best, vanished.
With competitors at every corner, deploying first could reap benefit only when you can assure quality. By automating your functional test suite you are assuring quality in the agreed time. Your ability to deliver will earn you customer loyalty.
Amplified reusability of test scripts
A booking web app can have input parameters with many variations. Say, a date input which varies across the users. The date needs to be tested with various combinations of logins, locations, time, and other user inputs.
With manual testing, any such web app can take hours if not days of work. The same tests can be put on automation. The scripts once made will be repeatedly used for various combinations of inputs. This amplification reduces the effort significantly while testing for a wide range of inputs.
Moreover, manual testing doesn’t reduce your efforts when minor changes are made to a feature. With automation you only need to edit the test case for the changed part. As this takes only a few minutes, the tests can start running immediately. Thus, the feature is deployed much faster.
It is important to note that not all automation frameworks support importing data sets. Some frameworks only allow changing data set from the script. Few other frameworks need variations in the scripts for a single data set. These are laborious and time consuming approaches.
Hence, you must use a framework that allows importing of data sets. By doing this you can test all possible combination of inputs with a single script. This approach gives higher ROI compared to other frameworks.
Improved quality leads to a strong brand
One of my acquaintance (a crazy shopper) has abandoned a shopping site for a small reason. She found that few items in her cart disappeared when she wanted to checkout. The website had a fault – It couldn’t notify the items that cannot be delivered to her location. All her efforts in selecting the items was wasted. She left the website angry.
Although this website offered great discounts, she has not changed her mind. She (like many other users) speaks about this experience in her social circle. The bad review gets compounded and the brand will lose customers for not meeting the quality.
Brand building comes from years of effort. The web app also grows more complex and has chances to ruin the reputation even with small errors. Thus, precision in testing a complex web app is important. Even a diligent tester will make mistakes during manual testing. Automated tests perform the same steps with more precision and never forgets to give detailed results.
Ensuring quality in large number of new releases
Ensuring quality in large number of new releases is difficult even with a QA team. One of our FinTech clients frequently releases features and updates. They have a team of eight QA engineers testing the code developed by thirty developers. The QA team leader is constantly under pressure to sign off on the quality of these releases to production.
For example, last week, they introduced 2 big and 3 smaller features, such as a change in user interface (UI), a new report, as well as stability issues and bug fixes. And these needed to be live in two days.
This is a tall order to manage. To avoid having to spend nights and weekends at work, their team adopted CloudQA to automate their entire regression test suite. The team made their workload manageable while ensuring that the releases maintained quality.
Enhanced test coverage boosts team morale
Imagine this – you have a team of manual testers, working on functional testing to be released into production in few days. The usual constraints and glitches (like environment not up or the build failed or smoke test failed) shorten the duration to one day, they try their level best and make the release. The next day your client reports a priority one bug. You could take out the frustration on your team thereby making the team frustrated.
Automating would help the team to perform exploratory testing in parallel or perform integration testing before the release. The unimpeded performance of the product will help boost the morale of your team.
We can help in improving the functional quality
CloudQA can help you in deploying high quality web applications faster. TruRT, our functional test tool will help you in building a comprehensive test suites. You can amplify reusability of test scripts, get precision in testing of complex web apps, and boost capabilities of your QA team.
You can write us at info@cloudqa.io
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How could Service Virtualization enhance your Agile Testing Strategy?
How could Service Virtualization enhance your Agile Testing Strategy?
How often you push your “Phone Updates” to a later date as an update install means your phone would not be available to work. Even though the updates just take a couple of minutes, but in a fast-paced world where a minute delay could mean a lot, non-availability of services for a fraction of seconds frustrate you.
Often the similar situation is faced by a Tester/QA while performing his daily testing jobs – environments are not up, dependencies are ambiguous, developers/business users need the SIT environment and ‘n’ number of such reasons.
That’s where Service Virtualization comes into the picture!
In fact, Service Virtualization is all about continuity and boosting agility!
What is Service Virtualization?
Service Virtualization in laymen terms is providing services in a virtual manner. Just like on the internet you have virtual friends, virtual classroom or virtual 3D view of an art gallery, in a similar fashion the services exist for a tester/QA to test, but are not the real services.
Service Virtualization by its means simplifies the issues faced by a Service-Oriented Architecture [SOA] testing strategy. By providing a virtual set-up of services, it speeds up the testing and development process.
A quick example that I could think of is “market data” provided by Bloomberg, Reuters, ACTIVE, WOMBAT that is the lifeline of many investment firms. But for a tester to test the market data scenarios they are connected either with a simulator or a different service that stores the recorded data [ a replica of live data].
By connecting to a virtual service, testing is continuous, and the live environment does not get affected.
How Service Virtualization Could Enhance Agile Testing
Technology is making things simpler for the end users, but complexity is hidden beneath under wraps giving a tough time to developers and testers. Be it chatbots, Pokemon Go or a virtual reality venture showcasing you hotel suites from your living room, the building/testing of tools and apps is not simple enough. To streamline the testing/developing process service virtualization when combined with #Agile becomes handy –
- Get Continuous – Bid goodbye to delays and waiting time for services from production, DevOps could now leverage virtual services and boost continuous testing.
- Integration is Seamless – With virtual services present at your disposal, integration testing is just a matter of connection and few clicks.
- Real Time Analysis – With virtual services, the analysis could be done real time helping in finding issues at an early stage.
- Cost Efficient – With increased complexity of components, simulating them for development/testing environment could be a risky affair. Service virtualization helps in reducing that cost but still provides the benefit of a real-life scenario.
- Enables Parallel Testing – With virtual services, testers/QA could test the pre-prod/UAT environment in parallel accelerating time-to-market and providing a quality software.
- Competitive Advantage – With Service Virtualization firms could process parallel development, quick fixes and boost quality that provides an added benefit when compared to companies following the linear development strategy.
- Good fit to ever changing requirements – In agile when requirements are ever-evolving, virtual services with their flexibility and easy-to-use parameters helps in maintaining the continuity and still follow the Agile process.
- Collaborate, Share and Grow – With multiple teams working on the assets, it gets tough to share the resources in Agile, but service virtualization facilitates on-demand access to resources anytime to any group.
- Test anytime – With virtual services you can test anytime, be it functional, integration or performance testing.
As in our last post, we saw “ The Best Practices of Continuous Agile Testing” we know continuity is the key for any software/tool to survive. With service virtualization, we are a step closer to make it continuous agile and quality-assured!
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Continuous Testing and Cloud are essential part of any Agile Team
A flowing river or a growing plant are all viewed with positivity and respect! Same applies to the software’s and technology, the one whose updates are stalled, start losing their existence. Is anyone using Windows XP? Or a Nokia Phone? Or any of your neighbor who has a CRT Television?
Continuity is Life!
To support Continuity in an SDLC be it for Continuous Testing or Continuous Delivery, Cloud plays a vital role, and this post would exclusively talk about the same –
What Are the Features Of Continuous Testing?
If we want a software to live longer we need to make it adaptable to latest technology and trends and to achieve it; the software may undergo frequent changes. How do you then ensure the frequent changes are not affecting the quality of the software? And how frequently could you release the new changes to your client? Hence, we need continuous Testing to –
- Test Early – Finding issues with walkthroughs and analysis in the requirement or Design Phase
- Test Faster – Discovering gray areas with the tools like TestNG or MAVEN
- Test Often – Using JENKINS one could get a daily build and track problems on regular basis
- Automate Testing – Using tools like Selenium could help in automating test cases and provide faster results
How Could Cloud Help in Achieving Continuous Testing
What is Cloud-Based Testing
Cloud Based Testing is when testing is executed with the use of Cloud computing that could help in reducing time-to- market because of easy deployment and assist in collaborating with the different teams in an Agile Team.
What Are the Advantages Offered by Cloud in Continuous Testing?
Cloud Computing Offers
- Easy Collaboration – With a new feature Dev Team could introduce changes, QA could design specific use cases, and DevOps could deploy and manage the environments with the easy access cloud computing offers.
- Deployment is Quick – When compared to on-premise deployment, deployment is quick saving time and resources.
- Access Anytime Anyplace – No matter which geographic location you are, Cloud allows you to access the environment from anywhere anytime. That means Testing on the go!
- Expand the possibility of Testing-As- A-Service[TAAS] – With Cloud Platform serving as Platform-As- A-Service[PAAS] it reduces the glitch of accessing hardware and thereby speeding the process of continuous testing
- Tasks Gets Streamlined – With cloud and agile teams working in collaboration, dev team could concentrate on development, QA on their test scripts, execution, and component testing while devops on performance and deliveries.
- Produces Results on the go – Share your results with stakeholders, and other team members as they get executed.
- Incremental Testing a Possibility – Need to upgrade your environment to latest OS or the latest version of Java, tweaking a setting and running the additional testing makes continuous testing an opportunity.
- Integration Testing is Seamless – Need to integrate different systems to run an integrated test, with cloud you need to configure it just once and could repetitively use it for your testing.
- Secure Database Checks – With customized Database as an offering it is easy for testers to perform data validation and field checks.
- Enhances Productivity – A user can evaluate project performance, gauge product development and verify testing results allowing you to stay on track and improve productivity.
With technology, we have seen a change in every phase of SDLC, while traditional methods of testing had been cumbersome and time-consuming. Continuous Testing in collaboration with Cloud could lead to provide more scalable, robust and quality products to our users.
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