Software Testing in Agile Environment

Abstract

Software testing is used to maintain the quality of software product and to ensure that the client’s needs and requirements are met. This includes costly and tedious verification and validation techniques. Although widely used, it is mostly ad-hoc and expensive activity. Software testing involves a lot of different activities to achieve different goals. Hence, there are a number of challenges in this area. However, it is very expensive task and has to be performed by skilled quality analyst and test engineers as there are cases which needs to be tested which are not covered by code. Involvement of Agile environment and tight timelines makes desired software quality more hard-to-achieve. Hence, test automation has been proposed as a possible solution. The unification of manual and automation testing is one of the proposed ideas. Manual testing is checking the manually for possible bugs and defects, combining it with automation testing gives us semi-automation or hybrid automation process. Meaning, one test case’s few steps being executed manually and then machine takes over the execution, which was one of the earliest stages of moving from waterfall to Agile environment before moving to fully automated testing. Automation support for testing lowers the QA’s engagement time hence the cost is saved. The study shows the transition from traditional work environment to agile work environment and how the team managed it smoothly. What challenges team faced and how the team handled them to ensure the agile transformation. An interview with the ex-colleagues of the author also provides a good understanding of software testing from other’s point of view (i.e. software engineer, test automation engineer, developers etc.). We also tried to cover the tools used for automation at the later stage of the project.