The continuous state of development in Agile and DevOps necessitates continuous testing in order to remain competitive. Today, as businesses transform to become digital, IT organizations often struggle to keep up with the demand for increased testing in fast-paced and complex development environments. The crux of the challenge is that organizations find it difficult to incorporate a comprehensive and robust validation process at the speed of Agile and DevOps. Ad Hoc and unstructured testing can not only be an impediment to accelerated development, it can also significantly increase the risk of quality issues that can impact the business. The need of the hour is therefore to create an effective test management approach that can meet the demand for high-quality releases releases at increased speed and efficiency.
Why you must have a successful test management strategy in place
1. Handing last minute changes
The very essence of Agile development is frequent delivery of software, each time adding or enhancing a small feature which is of value to the customer. Therefore, requirements are smaller and change frequently as development progresses. Continuously changing requirements and last minute changes can impact the scope of testing unexpectedly, leading to the scrapping or modification of work that has already been carried out and frustrate testers. If test cases are not updated to account for new changes in requirement, there is a risk that critical business issues and vulnerabilities are signed off.
Moreover, with testing evolving into a wide variety of forms, such as automated, exploratory, automated, performance, and security testing, the sheer number of tests needed for verification and validation of a given requirement has increased.
A well-defined test management strategy can help your teams handle the risky handoff between requirements definition/management and test case creation/execution. With every test case tied back to a requirement, testers can have complete visibility and thoroughly understand the specific requirements behind every test. When new features are shipped, QA teams can clearly analyze the risk involved in shipping those particular features and validate them accordingly.
Without a robust test management system, it can be overwhelming to accurately capture and tie back tests to requirements, and track goals, progress, and interdependencies throughout the development process.
2. Providing real-time updates with seamless collaboration
The pace of development in Agile and DevOps calls for greater visibility and collaboration across teams. Defects that are identified later in the development cycle are likely to be bigger problems in terms of quality and substantially more expensive to fix. It is therefore critical to enable real-time sharing of updates on your project, so there is no lag time that will affect quality.
When executed correctly with the right tools, test management is the best way to provide a single source of truth for different teams (product management, development, testing), so they can seamlessly collaborate on test planning and execution. Teams are able to track progress in real-time and provide quick feedback, thereby increasing the project’s flexibility and speeding up the overall QA process.
3. Untangling chaos through end-to-end traceability
A robust test management tool can provide the end-to-end traceability and visibility that Agile testing teams need to track test efforts across the development lifecycle in order to make better decisions about quality and ensure adequate test coverage.
In fast-paced development environments, it is critical to assess every step of a testing cycle and maintain a constant track of every testing phase and resulting defects for better insights into what has been tested, what has not been tested, and how everything ties back to requirements. End-to-end traceability is at the crux to achieving a complete and thorough testing process that can keep pace with the speed Agile and DevOps and ensure a quick assessment of impact as and when a change occurs.
As Agile and DevOps bring testing into the mainstream of development processes, a comprehensive test management strategy can be pivotal for organizations looking to compress the software development lifecycle while ensuring that optimal quality of software is maintained when it is released to the marketplace. By maximizing visibility across the development lifecycle, it can eliminate silos between multiple project stakeholders and allow them to move significantly faster while simultaneously identifying problems earlier and with greater accuracy.
If you are looking for a comprehensive test management tool within Jira, contact us for a free demo of synapseRT.