The Software development and testing industry is always willing to embrace methodologies that promise efficiency and better results. Agile development and testing became popular because of these advantages and it has been gaining pace. Agile testing is also emerging as a great way of reducing technical debt that majority of the companies were experiencing.

More and more companies are adopting agile development and testing; but there is still a lack of clarity in terms of what agile team members are expected to do. In some cases, the adaptation has happened only on papers with a little bit of team changes whereas, the teams are still functioning as they were previously. This blog will address these two issues.

How to Get Started?

To get started, there will be different actionable for management and team members. This means that managers will not only be responsible for laying the foundation and providing direction to the team members; but also taking steps to ensure that the new process is being followed. On the other hand, the team members must follow the new steps and share improvement suggestions or challenges with the manager on a frequent basis to ensure that the maximum benefit is achieved from the process changes.

What to Do and How?

This again is a collaborative point where the manager and the team have to work together. Agile testing is more about performing in a cross-functional environment and being able to embrace the new methods of working which would vary slightly. Here is a list of things that you and your team will need to do:

• Define and Refine: The manager will define the process with stages involved and you as a team member will refine. An example is to determine the scope of testing. As a manager, you should provide an outline of expectations and let the team carve out a plan on how they will achieve it. This define and refine process is an ongoing step and quite related to our next step.

• Work and Learn: The word agile means quick movements and in Software development, it would refer to a strategy where tasks are performed to complete smaller goals. This methodology requires the manager and team to work and then assess the results in order to come up with approaches that can make the overall process more efficient and better.

• Automate and Elaborate: Agile testing requires a mix of automation and manual testing and you need to automate what you can to speed up the process. You will also need to elaborate the process in terms of creating test cases that need to be followed and documenting all major step so that in case the team changes, the documentation can help the new members.

• Mix and Fix: In a Software Testing Services providing team, As a tester, you are going to be working with team members who are performing different functions like designing or developing. It is important that you collaborate with them to understand their perspective. A healthy collaboration can help you effectively handle situations where developers would need to fix issues and you will have to verify them.

Implementing agile testing would require consistent evaluation of the effort involved and the outcome achieved. The team members and the managers should work together to enhance the process and come up with strategies that would ensure greater efficiency.

The team members must devise strategies that will save time and effort and managers must ensure that the teams are not spending time and effort in doing things that can be taken care of by automation. A collaborative approach is what is needed to make agile testing a success.