Agile Testing and Test Automation

Agile Testing and Test Automation goes hand in hand; without automated tests, agile testing becomes almost impossible.

Agile testing is all about evaluating software changes as soon as possible and as often as possible during the software release cycle. The key success to agile testing is to automate the tests that are executed most often, and in most cases the smoke test and the priority-1 tests are executed most often.

The way to introduce agile testing in an organization the first step is to put together a plan to move toward the agile testing approach. The plan will need to identify specific tasks and goals in meeting this goal, which is to test early and often.

A plan may look like this:-

1. Identify system smoke test, and system priority-1 tests.
2. Automate System smoke test and system priority-1 tests.
3. Identify area specific smoke test, and area specific priority-1 tests.
4. Automate area specific smoke test, and area specific priority-1 tests.

In large systems, critical areas within the system gets to be automated first.

The result will be a repository of automated set of tests that will provide evidence that the software is OK from the testing side. Of course, prior to running this tester level automated tests, a set of developer level automated tests is run to provide evidence that the software is OK from the developer side. Both automated tests, tester tests and developer tests are executed together. This what makes agile testing possible.