QMetry recently hosted practitioners and evangelists of agile testing for an invigorating discussion on agile testing’s impact on delivering quality faster and better at the TEST Focus Groups in London, UK. We had the pleasure of chatting with expert practitioners, scrum masters, new agile converts and aficionados representing companies of all sizes. We all started to break down this topic to discover what lies beneath today’s agile testing realm.

Big question – what does agile testing mean to you?

Everybody seems to go head-over-heels about agile, but how do you experience it in your everyday work? Besides adopting a series of techniques and methodology (scrums and sprints sound familiar?) how can a QA team’s culture get engaged with agile testing DNA?

Participants agreed that core agile testing practices include the adoption of following concepts:

1. Distributed teams
2. Test driven development
3. Behavior driven development
4. Automated testing
5. Continuous integration, continuous delivery & DevOps
6. Refactoring

One size fits all?

Every organisation is different and so are their agile-transition maturity processes. The key is to identify the agile methodologies that fit their needs and to keep building incremental efforts on top. This will allow the transition to run smoothly.

Mind the gap! Agile means different things to different people. Therefore, it is critical to agree on the team’s definition of agile and establish clear goals. Moving forward, it is advised  to:

1. Identify agile evangelists to set up a collaborative cross-functional team.
2. Define the roles of product owner, business user, developers and QA team members.
3. Create a clear understanding of what success and failure means.
4. Create well-defined team structure with clear command structure.

What about automation?

The importance of automation is increasing in the agile world. In-sprint automation is a key goal for most of the practitioners and scrum QA teams can work on the same. Some have a separate automation team if their project demands the same. It all boils down to the sprint planning. Many teams are already at sprint minus 1 automation. Automation of acceptance test is a key success for many organisations. Leveraging a tool such as QMetry Automation Studio, will help your team connect with open source test automation frameworks like Selenium and Appium to bring structure, efficiency, and reusability to automated testing efforts.

The final step is to have selection of right tools. Agile has distributed teams and proper test management tool is required for creating a collaborative, common view. A comprehensive test management tool will enable a single view to all the stakeholders and provide a wide-ranging set of reports and quality metrics will help QA teams in their journeys for continuous improvement.

Looking ahead, imagine if you could leverage your information from past runs to improve. Here is where predictive analytics and actionable intelligence comes into picture. QMetry Wisdom has been developed just for that.

Edited from press release by Cecilia Rehn.