“A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week,” said the esteemed General George S. Patton.

The impending transformation from the Traditional way of Testing to the agile way has been long in the standing. This is no new change for the IT sector as agile has been the norm for quite a while now.

Organisations face the need to adapt themselves to a complex business environment and under these circumstances, organization agility plays a key role in gaining strategic advantages and market success.

HOW HAS SOFTWARE TESTING EVOLVED FROM A TRADITIONAL WAY OF WORKING TO THE MODERN AGILE SOFTWARE DELIVERY?

In traditional scenarios, the testing team is categorized into silos, and there is literally no interaction needed with the developers or other teams on a daily basis. Traditional software delivery, namely, the waterfall model tends to view testing as a manual activity which takes up a large chunk of project time.

Agile requires constant communication with all the teams involved. This is a continuous process thereby depicting a reduction in the overall testing time which is actually not the case. Throughout the delivery, testing runs in parallel with development, resulting in the effort being spread evenly throughout the project.

HOW IS THE ROLE OF THE MODERN TESTER COMPARED TO THAT OF A TRADITIONAL TESTER?

The realm of software testing is changing — and so, too, is the role of the software tester.

Testers in a modern TCoE (testing centers of excellence) are required to be multi-skilled, collaborative, technical and most importantly, possess an agile mindset. The testers are always in sync with the development team and plan the testing activity accordingly.

This new collaborative Agile TCoE demands a new QA & testing skill set and automated solutions. Testers need to be experts on the latest tools and technologies. As part of multi-disciplined teams, they must strive to understand more about development, business ecosystems and operations, customer expectations, and end-user adoption.

Testers in a traditional TCoE are generally separated from development. As a consequence, bugs in the code are only discovered after the developers have completely written it. Although developers assume full responsibility for fixing the bugs, it becomes harder and costlier to work on them after such a long duration.

WHY MAKE THE SHIFT FROM TRADITIONAL TO MODERN AGILE AT ALL?

An approach that delivered efficiency improvements a few years ago and has become popular with the denizens of the technical society starts to hit its effectiveness plateau. Change is inevitable and is the only constant in a life of variables.

Traditional TCoEs are perfect examples of this. They still ensure consistent application quality, but those traditional testing factories are beginning to give way to models that are flexible and agile in nature.

Consider this argument. Ask yourself this: What were you doing on a Friday night three weeks ago? Does the answer instantly jump to your mind? Now if I were to ask you what you were doing last night, I will get an immediate reply. In that lies the simple fact that recreating something that happened long ago is never easy. This is why developers are leaning towards modern agile testing as they can inspect the code that they had written recently instead of trying to recall what they wrote two months ago which is the case with the waterfall model.

TO SUMMARIZE

Today, many of the organizations are proactively streamlining their development and testing processes in order to optimize application delivery.

Working in an agile environment can be challenging for testers coming from traditional projects, but by being open, flexible, and adaptive, they will find that an agile team is a wonderful place to be a tester.

Testing doesn’t have to be a time-consuming element of software development. So be a part of the journey leading you to use modern agile testing and experience its numerous benefits first hand!

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