QASource Blog

Ensure your agile test strategy drives real business value by aligning it with core goals. Learn how to connect testing efforts with measurable outcomes, enhance team collaboration, and prioritize features that matter in this practical guide by QASource.

In an agile testing environment, both developers and testers are involved in the software development life cycle from beginning to end.

The Agile testing environment creates strength in numbers. It aligns the talents and vision of your entire team to ensure the promise of your product becomes a market reality. Every stakeholder in your software development life cycle is involved from beginning to end. You can maintain an end-user focus through the development and analysis of daily builds using a cyclical, continuous integration model. The core of the Agile environment is the relationship between developers and testers. Each plays a vital role in what has traditionally been the other's exclusive domain. Developers participate in automated unit testing, for example, while testers are involved right from the initial sprint planning.

Software testing is a challenging and complex process that requires knowledge of many different areas. From understanding the business to knowing what types of bugs can be introduced, there's a lot to consider when testing a software. The difficulty in testing software has increased as developers produce more intricate codes with more outstanding features. The number of defects found during development increases because the complexity increases; however, it decreases if the developer uses static analysis tools or other automated methods for finding and fixing errors early on in the development cycle.

The financial services sector is constantly evolving. Increasing investor scrutiny, changing market trends and constant technological developments have made it imperative for financial institutions to harness the latest technology to provide quality customer service.

An agile team that operates without continuous integration is like driving a race car in first gear. Your team can still make it to the finish line, but deploying to market will happen at a speed that works against best agile development methods and against your business goals. Continuous integration was made for agile lifecycles. What team doesn’t want to deploy smaller code changes and catch more defects earlier in the development process? What team wouldn’t benefit from reducing backlog, increasing transparency and launching stronger product quality? Continuous integration puts you back in the driver’s seat, and the leading CI tools accelerate how quickly error-free products move to the market.

There’s a reason why so many teams choose to follow agile engineering best practices. This streamlined process for software design and development delivers value in a variety of ways, including:

Agile and offshore are two of the most exciting ideas currently filling the QA space. Both practices offer software developers production efficiencies and comprehensive product advantages that are becoming industry standard. By combining the two, you get higher-quality results faster, cheaper and with a better focus on the user experience. That is a lot of promise. Can you really depend on an offshore Agile test automation service to deliver?

As separate development and QA teams merge together to form larger DevOps teams, the Agile process is getting more play than ever. Working in an agile way encourages teams to iterate in parallel-to test code as it’s written, so as to uncover any major problems earlier on in the software development lifecycle. The Agile process was an answer to the slow, outdated Waterfall method, in which products were developed in fits and starts, with various delays and blockages slowing the entire process down.