How to Scale an Agile Testing Framework?
Large-scale organizations are now steadily embracing agile methodology, but are they doing enough to adopt an Agile framework?
Organizations are considering agile methodology for project management as agile testing is flexible and evolutionary. Agile methodology has evolved over the years, and today it is a popular choice for many organizations for project management irrespective of any industry.
The modern workspace demands a highly flexible and incremental approach to managing their projects. Adopting the Agile framework seems the most viable option because of its attributes like flexibility, transparency, quality, and continuous improvement. As per a report, the projects that adopt Agile methodologies are 28% more successful, which drives 71% of organizations to opt for Agile frameworks for their projects.
Top companies combine Agile methodologies with other frameworks making project management easy and handling it without hassles. Since most of the projects are timebound, organizations aim at delivering quality and value to the customers within the given time constraints.
Why do organizations need an Agile framework? Here are the benefits of the Agile framework.
1. Great project management and superior product quality
Product testing is an integral part of the Agile framework that ensures superior product quality at the beginning of product development and project inception stage. Since Agile methodology involves continuous integrations based on the current market scenario, changes can be integrated based on clients demand in the development process. Organizations can keep improving product quality and team efficiency by adapting to the Agile framework.
2. Improving team’s efficiency
Agile teams work independently and have complete authority over their decisions. They manage and organize the team taking ownership. As Agile project management is flexible, the teams working in Agile projects can acquire new skills and excel in their roles. The team operate cross-functionally, which makes them discuss challenges and collaborate better. Since the team working in Agile projects have fewer members, they have a better scope of either mastering their skill or learning something new every day.
3. Ensuring customer satisfaction
In the Agile framework, customers are looped in with the recurrent changes. Since the Agile methodologies are flexible and adaptable, it easily adapts to new changes making them extremely easy to incorporate. The changes are based on customer feedback during the development phase, ensuring customer satisfaction. It leads to developing products, which the customers’ expectations and demand.
4. Reducing time to market
The Agile framework helps in reducing time-to-market, which allows project managers and owners to take advantage of multiple opportunities. Reduced time-to-market, superior quality, and cost-efficiency will make customers come back to you for more.
5. Controlling the project
The Agile framework is transparent and allows continuous integration of quality-control features. Agile frameworks focus on ensuring high-quality products from the implementation phase of the project. All stakeholders are involved in the process with daily progress reports through advanced reporting tools and techniques.
6. Improving project predictability
The Agile framework allows the project manager to identify and predict risks and plan to ensure that the project runs smoothly. It also improves process visibility and creates an effective mitigation plan.
7. Reducing risks
The Agile framework works in small sprints with continuous integration and a focus on continuous delivery. Strategically, in Agile methodology, a small section is reserved. If the project fails to keep up with the expectations, then the part, which is reserved will be used to reduce the risks for the project.
8. Increasing flexibility
Agile projects are divided into short sprints, which makes them extremely flexible to manage. It allows the team to incorporate changes based on customers’ feedback in a short time. The Agile methodology comes with unparalleled flexibility making it a predominant choice for many organizations.
9. Continuous improvement
An Agile framework encourages better team collaboration and the exchange of ideas. It allows the team to share their experience and learn from their mistakes. The team gets enough chance to reflect on their mistakes, which helps them improve each sprint over the previous ones.
10. Using the right metrics
The team uses accurate and relevant metrics to measure time, cost, and performance in Agile methodologies. Since the Agile framework is broken down into smaller sprints, only the most relevant metrics like lead time, cycle time, and throughput are used to measure the team’s performance, identify bottlenecks, and make data-driven decisions and rectify them.
Following are the techniques to scale agile methodology for organizations.
1. Releasing initial MVP (minimum viable product) followed by focusing on CD/CI
The Agile projects follow CD/CI methodologies in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). The strategy allows organizations to provide high-quality software to the end-users. To understand how the end product will perform and incorporate the results and test the hypothesis, it is recommended to release a minimum viable product (MVP) to gather feedback from the users on the usage pattern. It will help the team to save time, money, and effort for the project.
2. Focusing on high-priority tasks
Product managers must have a fair understanding of the priority tasks. Prioritizing the important tasks allows the team to prevent miscommunication and create a collaborative test environment for the project. However, they create a group of backlogs, which is addressed before releasing codes.
3. Build a strong team
The Agile framework includes product owners, developers, and testers. They form a team to review requirements and test features request on backlogs. Building a strong team helps in improving the Agile framework as the product owner expresses the business requirements, the programmer explains implementation, and the tester considers potential issues to be addressed. The Agile frameworks allow to incorporate different viewpoints helping the team to control the project status.
4. Choose a large-scale agile framework
There are three frameworks used to scale the Agile testing projects. These are the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS). The team must undergo multi-level training and certifications to handle these frameworks. Apart from these, three there is Scrum of Scrums (SoS), which can be used without even having formal training. As these framework demands extensive training, learning, and certification before you use them for any Agile project, it is recommended to go through training.
Following are the names of the popular testing platform which follows the Agile methodologies and are built on the Agile framework.
1. Selenium is ideal for testing with multiple solutions, Selenium WebDriver, Selenium IDE, and Selenium Grid. It supports multiple frameworks, like Data-Driven, Keyword Driven, Cucumber, JUnit, NUnit, and Test NG.
2. Tenjin Suite of test Automation is a codeless test automation solution, which has robotic capabilities to learn and adapt to the application and its updates. This is a plug-and-play that, regardless of the complexity and number of updates, facilitates continuous testing, minimizing the manual effort and speeding up the test execution.
3. Testim is a scalable, AI-powered test automation tool, which is ideal for cross-browser tests. It can be initiated by the built-in scheduler or from a CI action and integrates with all prominent CIs
4. Kobiton is ideal for Appium test automation on mobile and allows users to do functional, visual, and performance testing on real devices either in the Cloud or on-premises. Kobiton AI-driven scriptless solution allows QA teams to perform functional, performance, and visual tests and automate them
5. Testlio is a networked testing platform and service that is known for its work in networked testing, specifically in in-house, outsourcing, and crowdsourced testing best practices. It virtually offers a network of skilled testers who perform functional testing, usability testing, localization testing, and location testing.
The Agile framework helps teams and organizations improve the quality of the product and enhances the professional skill of the team members. Projects that are budget and time constraints can be highly beneficial with Agile methodologies. Hence organizations don’t mind investing in the Agile framework or even investing in scaling the Agile testing framework.