How Agile Tackles "Inadequate Testing Challenges”

In the recent years, the surge of Agile development has been overwhelming. As Agile development is rapid, more efficient and productive methods to deliver high-quality software have materialized. Many are shifting to the Agile approach from traditional approach. Waterfall model is one such traditional method, which provides a systematic approach to software development.

The main limitation of the Waterfall model is that, you have to start the processes from the initial phase of development, once the tester detects a bug in the software. This is a time consuming process which is strictly not applicable to large projects. However, Agile have more testing challenges than that of waterfall development model.  This happens because Agile requirements are more undemanding and Agile constructs its processes more regularly, supporting rapid sprints.

If you are a newbie, let me give you more information regarding Agile and Waterfall model:

• Agile methodology consists of development cycles called Sprints, which are shorter in period. Sprints are normally of 2-3 weeks, whereas Waterfall models are normally of many months. 
• In Agile development, the integration process is done, which means that, the code is checked in a daily manner (several times per day). On the other hand, Waterfall model waits for testing until all the processes are completely developed. This lasts for many months. 
• Agile development is completed in smaller parts, where requirements can change as we progress with the development. Waterfall is more structured, in which the requirements are completely defined and have to follow till the complete cycle ends. Waterfall model has a strict rule for change management.

Agile teams mostly encounter the challenge, “Inadequate Testing”, while developing the software. Here are the recommended solutions to handle them quickly and effectively.

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Inadequate test coverage causes big problems. It is often written according to the user stories. It is a result of a few test cases for each user story. Developers sometimes change the code as per their convenience.They do it so as to fix the bugs, restructure the code without changing its external behaviour. Developers also change the code because they want that only the code should work, so they improve it. Often these codes are not tested.

To avoid this problem, it is important to check the code, so as to protect your team from troublesome incidences, before that code goes into the production. Before covering any test, make sure you have a sound understanding of the features which are being delivered. For each and every feature, you should know how it will work, what are the constraints and what exactly are the functions. Agile works on user stories. So, creating your test scenarios on user stories helps you achieve optimal test coverage.

Once the Quality Analyst (QA) and the development teams make the features final for deployment, you can begin creating tests for those features. For best results and to make it time effective, always carry out the Coding and Testing of the feature parallely. In this way, you can resolve the problem of “Inadequate Testing”.