How to Empower Enterprise Agility with Test Automation

1. How to Empower Enterprise Agility with Test Automation

2. How to Empower Enterprise Agility with Test Automation Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility. This mantra for enterprise agility has always been publicly available as one of the twelve principles on which the Agile manifesto was defined. The question is, despite it being in existence for almost two decades, why aren’t more enterprises following these principles? Negligence, lack of awareness, or maybe they simply do not care? Whatever the reason may have been, it has resulted in a failed Agile adoption – pushing enterprises spiraling down the ladder of quality and technical debt. Agile, both etymologically and functionally, means speed. Traditional software development methodologies just cannot keep up with the pace at which the IT landscape is evolving. Being bombarded with innovations left, right, and center, the industry cannot afford to sit and wait around till their legacy methods complete the designated cycle. The result will come too late and will be too little compared to what is needed. Agile manifesto promotes quality over quantity. Working software is the primary measure of progress. If even after such a long wait, the product delivered at the end of the cycle is not at par with the desired specifications, then the whole cycle is a total waste, measuring zero on the progress scale. This is the primary reason why the need for a more robust, efficient, and fast development methodology arose – to eradicate wastage and improve productivity. Agile adoption is not only about smaller iterations and faster deployments but also about offering a sustainable environment to motivate individuals to deliver valuable software continuously.

3. How to Empower Enterprise Agility with Test Automation “Value” and “Customer Satisfaction” are the core necessities that Agile fulfills. However, an enterprise cannot meet these needs by only shortening its production cycles. It requires a continuous testing and improvement mechanism integrated into the very process to eliminate redundancies and assure quality. As per a report, while 88% of the surveyed organizations have adopted Agile, only about 26% of them have a broad test automation strategy in place. This is where the majority of enterprises are lagging. Manual testing defeats the purpose of Agile adoption Testing is a laborious and time-consuming task if performed manually. Picture this – each agile sprint should ideally span across only a few weeks and continuous testing is critical for a successful agile cycle. If a developer keeps sending each code for manual testing before moving on to the next step, it will be absolutely infeasible to stay within the designated timeframe. In fact, such practice will stretch one sprint for years, thus, taking the enterprise back into the rut of waterfall and other legacy methodologies. Quality assurance is critical for effective sprints “Quality is the ally of schedule and cost, not their adversary. If we have to sacrifice quality to meet schedule, it’s because we are doing the job wrong from the very beginning.” – James A. Ward As enterprises started taking the agile route for their software development processes, they miscalculated the value of quality

4. How to Empower Enterprise Agility with Test Automation assurance and testing. Faster deployments, under no circumstances, can compensate for a botchy and buggy software. While it is imperative that the duration of an average SDLC is reduced and new features are deployed with every sprint, it is equally important to ensure that the features perform the way they are supposed to. With Agile adoption, two rather critical things took the back seat in an enterprise’s software development wagon – Planning and Quality Assurance. Planning in Agile is as important as the actual execution, but that is a discussion for another day. Just like in legacy methodologies, enterprises shifted the responsibility of detecting errors in software to the end-users – which is anything but ideal. The ultimate goal for any business is revenues, which is directly linked to how satisfied the customers are. When customers are presented with a non-intuitive, inoperable application, they will not think twice before switching to the competitor’s products. For each sprint to be truly effective and meaningful, quality assurance needs to be omnipresent, deeply integrated at every step. Having QA established right from the beginning helps identify and rectify defects in real-time. Test automation enhances the productivity of each cycle Manual testing is tedious and requires time, which Agile sprints cannot spare. ‘No Testing’ is not an option. To get out of this flummoxing situation, test automation is the solution. By automating iterative, standard testing processes, enterprises can save significant time without compromising the quality. With test automation, codes can be tested simultaneously to

5. How to Empower Enterprise Agility with Test Automation the development. This enables Agile teams to detect defects early and exercise faster recovery. Automation not only enhances the speed of the sprint by obliterating time-consuming tasks but also reduces the overall testing efforts while ensuring that the developed code meets the desired requirements Challenges of incorporating automation testing across the industry An effective test plan requires automation testing to be incorporated. It does seem to be a huge task considering that an average test plan has more than 2,000 test cases. When incorporating automated testing, there are factors that give even the most successful Fortune 500 companies stop Read Full Blog at: https://www.cigniti.com/blog/agile-enterprise-test-automation/