Agile Testing Team: What Challenges are faced by them?
Summarize With:
Agile model is one of the trending and widely used software development approach based on the combination of incremental and iterative development, where software product is being continuous delivered in short and multiple cycles.
What is Agile Testing?
Agile testing is a testing approach based on agile principles of software development. In agile testing, continuous testing is being carried out with less or no documentation and regular feedbacks and reviews from the client/customers to improve software quality.
Further, agile testing methodology has following advantages:
- Better and effective communication, as agile development involves the participation of developers, testers and client/customers, all at one platform.
- With the collaboration of development team with the testing, defects are easy to locate and fix.
- Incorporation of dynamic changing requirements.
Although, agile testing has certain advantages, which may attract a tester to follow and implement agile testing practices, but carrying out agile testing is not simple as it seems to be. Testers who have been the part of the agile testing team are very well aware of the challenges faced during agile testing.
Agile Testing Team: Top 7 Challenges Faced by Them
Let's put some light on the top 7 challenges faced by agile testing team during agile testing:
- Insufficient Test Coverage: The continuous incoming and changing requirements increases the chance of missing out the testing of essential or critical functionalities and features. Further, short cycles and continuous delivery mechanism of agile model may force and drive testers to consider and test only critical functionalities and leaving behind all other major/minor functionalities untested.
- Lack of documentation: Although, less or no documentation is one of the features of agile testing, still the non-availability of documentation work puts testing team in a difficult situation to verify and validate the software functioning in the absence of documentation work.
- Dynamic changing requirements: Frequently incoming and changing requirements after each iteration changes or modifies the software either in large or in small respect and irrespective of the changes brought, the system has to made go through regression testing to verify and validate the originality of the system. Thus, apart from regular testing, creating regression tests and executing them after each iteration increases the burden of the testing team.
- Last minute changes: Incorporation of incoming and changing requirements is an inherited feature of the agile methodology. The mechanism of the agile methodology lies itself on the fact that requirements would be evolved gradually with the collaboration of all teams including business team with the client/customers. However, when testing is about to close and product is ready for its market release, at that moment of time introduction of any more changing requirements is intolerable for the testers, especially when the deadlines are approaching.
- Performance parameter: As in agile methodology, software application gradually develops, complexity also increases gradually. Thus, performance issues with the software arises as the developers are not able to assess the performance attribute from end-user perspective.
- Tools selection: Selecting appropriate and desired automation tools for automating the tests not at early stage of development but in the later half is one of the major challenges faced by the agile testing team, as selecting tools for agile environment is much different to that for traditional approach of development.
- Communication: Although, development teams and client/customers collaboratively interacts after each iteration, still agile environment perceives the lack of proper communication due to absence of any effective communication medium or may be the absence of any sort of documentation.