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 arent 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,
its 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 enterprises 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 competitors 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-tes
t-automation/
6