Agile Testing for Startups: Navigating Product Evolution with Flexibility

Quick Overview: Software testing has been an integral part of well-developed products for a long time.There is no other way to put a product on the path of success other than ensuring quality.

Now, quality can be broken down into many parts, such as customer experience, functionality, reliability, security, and so on. There are no limits to quality. The more, the merrier. So, what happened traditionally is that software was tested at the end of the development cycle.

It would not be wrong to say that this method is still used across the software industry.Yes, we are talking about the waterfall methods of testing.

As time has progressed, with the rise of more and more startups, there has been a paradigm shift in the way software products are developed and tested.

Agile development and testing have taken a front seat.Although the waterfall method is a well-established way to develop and test software, the fast-paced, dynamic, and faster-to-market goals for a product launch have pushed the industry more towards agile methods.

‍As per the reports published on Facts and Factors Market Research the agile development and testing services market for the globe was valued at around $20 Billion in the year 2020.

It is expected to grow with a CAGR of 18% and reach a valuation of around $30 billion by 2026. The forecast period considered is between 2021-2026.Agile testing methods offer the flexibility to conduct testing products iteratively.

To put it into a few words in the context of startups, it just feels right.So, how can agile testing for startups help them achieve their goals?What are the methods to know while we adopt agile testing?

‍QAble is one of the best software testing companies in India that believes in keeping up with the best market trends and updates. Agile testing is a very effective way to ensure quality with speed.

With 5+ years in the software testing industry and working with numerous clients on diverse domains, we have grown and succeeded at what we do. With this post, we will shed light on agile testing for startups and share our experience and knowledge on the subject.Let’s get started.

Table of Contents

1. What is Agile Testing?
2. What is the Importance of Agile Testing?
3. How do Startups Benefit from Agile Testing?
4. Agile Testing Lifecycle
5. How is Agile Testing Different From Waterfall Testing?
6. What Methods Are Used for Agile Testing?
7. QAble Ensures Release-Ready Quality Products with Agile
8. Frequently Asked Questions - (FAQs)

What is Agile Testing?

Agile testing is the way to test software products in an iterative way. It works two basic principles. One is the collaborative approach and the other is continuous delivery.

Now these two approaches or principles can make a big difference while developing and testing modern software. These tests are a combination of manual testing methods like functional testing and automated testing using modern tools.

Startups love this approach. The reasons are pretty justified and aligned in such cases.The goals are less time-to-market, better quality, and continuous improvement. Additionally, it helps to keep everyone in the loop.

The development and testing teams work together in agile testing. Other key project members like the stakeholders, product owners, and business analysts are all in the loop.

It’s a win-win for everybody.It becomes much easier to track the progress of the project keeping everything nice and organized.

‍Also Read: QA Testing Challenges for Tech Startups: How to Solve Them

What is the Importance of Agile Testing?

The aim to make better products is taken care of by breaking down complex projects into smaller parts. As soon as the set of defined tasks is completed by the development team, the QA engineers test those right along. This in short is the core idea of agile testing.

DevOps tools have also become a go-to way while developing software products. This allows for making changes or updating projects on the fly.

Gone are the days when QA engineers had to wait and report bugs only after the entire project was complete. Agile testing has provided ways to test software since the early stages of development. Just like DevOps, QAOps is the new way to test with Agile.

‍Read More: Differences between DevOps and QAOps

How Do Startups Benefit from Agile Testing?

Startups are all about making great products with agility. With new and better technology being released for faster product development, agile is very much suited for it.Let’s walk through how Agile Testing can benefit startups.

Faster Market Releases

Who doesn’t like faster solutions? Everyone does.Right?Agile testing can help speed up the testing lifecycles. Since the development and testing are done in parallel, the product releases are much faster.

The inclusion of agile testing also helps to catch and resolve bugs from the early stages of development. Another thing that helps to make good products is bolstered by implementing the changes or updates in a continuous way.

Agile methodology is cut out for it. As a result, startups can release their products on a fast track.

Improves Customer Experience

Customer experience is also one of the top priorities when releasing products. It makes complete sense.

The market is full of software products for everything. The same is true with the startups. They need to make and keep customers happy at all times. Since there is so much competition, acquiring a customer is hard enough, let alone retaining them.

It’s not easy to keep customers happy.The moment they hit the smallest bug or issue, they will just abandon using the product. Agile testing can help to fix those issues in minimal time and even in real-time.

Reduces Friction Between Developers and QA Engineers

Agile testing helps in resolving issues in a product from the very early stages. The usual approach of waterfall methodology had a serious contingency.

Since the QA engineers were brought in only after project completion, the number of issues piled up very quickly. This led to confusion across team members. Needless to say, it affected deadlines and also was frustrating for all.

Agile testing proves to be very efficient in addressing such pitfalls. Since the QA engineers and developers worked in sync at all times, this promotes better collaboration.

Faster Feedback and Keeps Everybody in the Loop

As we discussed earlier about customer experience and better understanding among team members, agile testing also works great to act quickly with feedback. This approach helps startups to work on common goals and keep everyone up to speed.

Since the tasks are usually done using planned sprints, it is easier to keep track of the progress while keeping the feedback loop in place. This ensures quality at all stages.

Ease of Tracking Progress

Project management is an important part of any software development project. This is true for both waterfall and agile testing methods. Now what makes agile testing outshine waterfall methods is the way everything is managed dynamically.

Since there are pre-defined tasks fixed as per the sprint durations, the project managers can manage better. The key members of a project such as stakeholders, scrum masters, and the concerned teams are also up to date with the progress.

Effective Automation Strategies

Automation is getting more and more traction in software testing. Manual testing methods remain one of the most effective ways to test products when combined with automation testing to maximize the test coverage for the same.

Agile testing helps to include automation tools and frameworks as the development goes on. The right word to use here is parallel testing as soon as the development tasks for a fixed sprint are completed. This also helps to decide on the scope of automation tests that help to test a product efficiently.

‍Read More: A Complete Guide to Automation Testing Frameworks

Adaptive to Frequent Changes in Project Requirements

Modern software products have complex requirements and business use cases. This results in frequent changes in the scope of development and testing. Startups are the best examples of the same.

With so many technologies at hand and ways to solve a problem, the requirements tend to change or modify as a project progresses. Since agile methodology is great for these purposes, agile testing helps along the way keeping up the developers and other team members.

Helps to Document the Project and Progress Better

Agile testing works in a very planned and organized way.This puts a constraint on developers and QA engineers to create documentation and keep them updated. It is a great way to track issues and ensure quality in a streamlined fashion.

This documentation also allows new QA members to understand and adapt according to the current sprints. The stakeholders and other team members can also reference the documentation from start to finish.

‍Read More: What is Documentation in QA and How to Create Clear Test Plans?

Agile Testing Lifecycle

The above represents the most common steps and processes in while agile testing. These steps can be written as follows:

Step1 # Planning The Tests

The key team members and stakeholders decide on test schedules, processes, and expected results. This is usually done once per sprint which can be of one week or two week long.

Step-2 # Daily Scrum Meetings

The Scrum Master takes updates from the concerned members. Based on the progress, the next day's tasks are assigned.

Step-3 # Reviewing Test Agility

Usually done on a weekly basis, Progress reviewed by the stakeholders or business analysts.

Step-4 # Release Readiness Test

Checks are done to see if the developed and tested feature is deployment ready.

Step-5 # Assessing Impact

The deployed feature is assessed by the stakeholders and feedback is taken before the next sprint.

What is the Difference Between Agile Testing and Waterfall Testing?

What Methods Are Used for Agile Testing?

In this section, let’s check the methods usually implemented for agile testing

Test-Driven Development or TDD

In TDD or Test-Driven Development, once the project requirements are available with the QA engineers, the test cases are written before the development works are complete.Agile testing aligns with this kind of testing.

This simultaneous approach to testing enables QA engineers to test the written code for unit testing (functional testing) with speed and refactor the tests until the requirements are met. JUnit, Protractor, and Jasmine are widely used tools for the TDD.

Behavior-Driven development or BDD

BDD has been widely adopted by the QA community. Its capability to write test case scenarios based on natural language describing the expected behavior of a system makes it user-friendly and effective.

Automated tools are used along with it to test these scenarios as acceptance tests.Cucumber, testRigor, and Tricentis qTest are some of the most popular tools to conduct BDD for agile testing with test automation.

‍Read More: What is QA Automation?

Acceptance Test-Driven development or ATDD

ATDD includes the customers, the developers, and QA engineers to come in unison and decide on the acceptance criterion of a particular feature. Once everyone is on the same page, acceptance tests are written for validation accordingly.

As we explained in the post before, the customer experience is one of the top goals in agile testing. ATDD is one of the methods to ensure that while testing a project.Some tools for ATDD include TestNG, Robot, and Concordion.

Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing is based on the experience of QA engineers. An expert eye when combined with out-of-the-box thinking to perform testing during agile is very beneficial while testing the project.

This pushes the QA engineers to point out flaws that are not usually defined or foreseen. Including exploratory testing methods in agile helps ensure maximum quality from all aspects of a system or project. Some popular tools for exploratory testing comprise XRAY, TestRail, Azure Test Plans, and qTest Explorer

Session-Based Testing

Session-based testing in agile is an extended version of exploratory testing. The exploratory testing is done in a fixed time frame or session.

The QA engineers can detect issues in a structured way through exploration techniques and document them with results. This helps to make exploratory testing more effective and can help discover issues strategically.

QAble Ensures Release-Ready Quality Products with Agile

Agile methodology is truly a great way to work on complex projects. The methods and strategies for agile testing have more than a few advantages.

That’s why QAble highly recommends it to make better software. We have been practicing manual testing and automated methods with agile across most of the projects and the advantages it offers are just limitless.

As an established software testing company in India, we are committed to bringing the best out of your product with agile testing. Since we promote quality as a culture in the software industry, agile testing is here only for good and nothing less.