WHY AGILE TESTING IS PREFERRED?
In software development, agile practices involve discovering requirements and developing solutions through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer/end-user or stakeholders
Agile testing not only facilitates the early detection of defects but also reduces the cost of bugs by fixing them early. This approach also yields a customer-centric approach by delivering a high-quality product as early as possible.
Test plan in Agile
A test plan can be used in Agile, but it should be a general guide and not a rigid, unchanging document that takes a lot of time to create. Agile promotes working software over comprehensive documentation.
An Agile Test Plan is a very important document because it gives your Quality Assurance (QA) team the ability to have all high-level scenarios, business requirements and estimates in one place. The QA Analyst or Agile Tester would fill out an Agile Test Plan during each sprint planning event.
The Way Forward
There is no static document that dictates the course of testing in Agile. The direction comes from dialogues between all the stakeholders of the product. The whole team must be involved in quality assurance from the beginning of the sprint. The goal of interactions is that everyone on the team understands what to be tested and by what method. The test planning in Agile needs a cultural change in the organization. This is a continuous process and requires a constant promotion of collaboration.
QA challenges with agile software development
a) Chances of error are more in agile, as documentation is given less priority, eventually puts more pressure on QA team
b) New features are introduced quickly, which reduces the available time for test teams to identify whether the latest features are according to the requirement and does it truly address the business suits
c) Testers are often required to play a semi-developer roled
d) Test execution cycles are highly compressed
e) Very less time to prepare test plan
f) For regression testing, they will have minimal timing
g) Change in their role from being a gate-keeper of quality to being a partner in Quality
h) Requirement changes and updates are inherent in an agile method, becoming the biggest challenge for QA.
References
https://dzone.com/articles/why-you-cant-ignore-test-planning-in-agile-cloudqa
Author: Thecla Ezenwa
