Software Testing plays an integral role in the software development life cycle process. Automation testing tools and frameworks automate software with improved accuracy, higher coverage, and better security features. Meanwhile, a retrospective meeting will be held to understand and analyze past mistakes to improve the quality and performance of the team.

It becomes necessary to handle the test-related challenges and risks that emerge during the retrospective to maintain a constant improvement workflow toward the quality of the automation testing tools and framework used in the testing process.

In this blog, Let us understand how to handle automation testing-related impediments and risks that emerge during retrospectives with simple five-step methods.

Retrospective Overview

Retrospective means ‘looking back’, and the primary purpose of the agile retrospective meetings is to look back at the achievements, mistakes, failures, and lessons in the past. These meetings help analyze the ups and downs of the Agile development team’s performance and help to build a better work plan to improve the workflow process with the help of past data from the meeting.

The retrospective meetings are usually held after a sprint, usually after 2 to 4 weeks in most cases. There are certain techniques for retrospective meetings, such as 4Ls. They are

• Liked: What part did the team enjoy during the previous spirit? What went better than expected are a few examples. The liked can be anything like a process, achievement, particular action, or technology.
• Learned: In every spirit, each issue and risk allows learning something new. The learning can be technical or non-technical. Sometimes it can be completely unrelated to the work. So, learning does not have any borders or boundaries.
• Lacked: Lacked are parts that lacked or did not work as planned during the spirit. Lacked and longed for many similarities with each other in some cases. The changes in resources and requirements and unclear implementation are also considered lacking.
• Longed for: Longed for help the testing team share their thoughts and opinions. It can bring new ideas to the table and give acknowledgment to every team member.

What are Test-related Impediments?

Agile Impediments are the obstacles that get in the way of an individual or agile team, resulting in unfinished tasks or projects. Here are some of the common types of impediments that occur during automation testing.

• Missing documentation: The testing and development teams miss out on the documentation of scopes and specifics of the project, which leads to missing out on important aspects of client needs.
• Communication and compatibility issues: Lack of communication during the testing leads to the creation of unexpected outcomes and causes a break in the software lifecycle. The software should be compatible for multiple devices such as web browsers, mobiles, and tablets.
• Test environment duplication: Software testing has to be conducted on multiple testing environments, and it is difficult to duplicate a testing environment, which causes an impediment.
• Insufficient test data and test coverage: Poor-quality test data for software testing produces an inaccurate result, and insufficient test coverage affects the performance and quality of the product or application.
• Inadequate testing resources: This includes a lack of funding for the project, a shortage of skilled professionals for the development and testing process, and inconsistency in planning or fixing a deadline for the entire project or a particular task.
• Lack of clear requirements: If software development and testing requirements are not defined well in the early stage of the life cycle, it becomes hard for both developers and testers, creating hostility in production.

As the abovementioned impediments cause difficulties, let us see how to handle these impediments in automation testing and the risks that emerge during the agile retrospective meetings.

Handling Impediments in testing and risk emerges during the retrospective meetings

These risks and impediments can be handled through five stages of a step-by-step sequential process. They are

1. Prepare and Plan
2. Facilitate and Engage
3. Address and Resolve
4. Learn and Improve
5. Adapt and Resolve

These steps will also improve the outcome of the retrospective meetings and produce an insightful view of the retrospective practices and the overall automation testing process.

1. Prepare and Plan

Before the retrospective, it is important to plan the agenda of the meeting, the format, and the tool used during the automation testing. The data and feedback on automation testing activities from past progress should be collected from the team and stakeholders and prepared for the retrospective meetings. The data includes the outcome of testing activity over the spirit.

The communication in the planning and preparation phases of the retrospective should be open and honest to eliminate impediments and risks. This communication practice will also help identify topics and issues that should be prioritized during the discussion. The goals and expectations of the retrospective should also be communicated to get an expected outcome during the discussion.

During the planning, every team member should be included in discussing the issues and challenges to get a better perspective. Suggestions and input from every team member should be welcomed because they will help easily resolve the issues and risks related to the automation testing process.

2. Facilitate and Engage

Rather than blaming and criticizing fellow team members or your subordinates due to an occurrence of challenges and risks during automation testing, it is important to ensure that the team focuses on action and feasible improvement for the project. So it is important to facilitate and engage in constructive and collaborative communication among the team and stakeholders.

If you are a testing lead, you should reach out to everyone to encourage their participation in the discussion and listen to everyone’s concerns related to issues in automation testing activities. As a testing lead, you should ensure that the solution to the automation testing issues is related to the overall goal and vision of the project or product.

You can use different techniques and feedback methods to improve the creativity, learning, and action among the team. For example, you can use the star (Stop, Start, Continue, More of, Less of) model to classify the testing feedback or use the 5 whys technique, which is open-ended questions that help to analyze the root cause of the problem related to testing.

3. Address and Resolve

The retrospective meetings aim to remove and mitigate the automation testing impediments and risks during sprints. It is critical to capture the problems significantly influencing testing processes and treat them as priority issues. Make sure you add the right people and stakeholders into your solution brainstorming process to find a possible solution and action.

Depending upon the nature and scope of the issue, it may include a developer, tester, product owner, business analyst, and external partner.  Assign the owner and schedule a deadline for each action plan, and their progress and status should be tracked to speed up the resolving process.

The resolved solution should align with the team’s and the organization’s resources, and the solution should communicate effectively with all the parties in the project or product.

4. Learn and Improve

Continuous learning and improvement of testing processes and practices are essential for retrospectives to stay in the competitive market and produce a valuable product as stakeholders desire. It is important to promote the learning culture among team members to experiment with new testing mechanisms, tools, cloud platforms, and testing frameworks to share their learnings and discoveries in the sprint by documenting them and making them visible and accessible.

When it comes to using cloud platforms, LambdaTest serves as a robust cross browser testing platform designed to streamline and enhance the automation testing process for developers and testers. One key strength lies in its ability to automate complex and uncertain scenarios, providing a reliable solution for addressing varied testing requirements.

LambdaTest is an AI-powered test execution and orchestration platform that empowers developers and testers to perform automation testing seamlessly on over 3000+ real browsers and operating system combinations.

Facilitate cross-functional, collaborating communication among testers, stakeholders, and developers to know their viewpoint of acquisition. It is recommended to support them in implementing this set of recommendations and track even minimum results achieved after the changes. Assess the testing-related processes are measured in terms of performance indicators and metrics. At sufficiently large intervals, with the help of measured metrics and indicators, identify the areas that require additional improvement; such parts are documented to analyze insights for the next steps. Lastly, recognizing the dedication and work of the team toward their success is important when we celebrate a win or an achievement.

5. Adapt and Experiment

Facilitation and engagement in retrospective meetings depend on the capability to adapt different formats and experiment with them. However, it allows them to adjust the various testing tools, frameworks, and methods according to the needs or preferences of a team so that the retrospective can remain relevant since it is fresh. Create a socio-cultural and mindful environment to allow for individual growth while ensuring productivity at the group level.

The team should maintain a calm and relaxed dynamic, so it is important to avoid or force new practices or ideas that may cause a conflict of interest or resistance among the team, resulting in poor performance. Adopting and experimenting with new formats and discoveries may cause new risks and issues in testing. So, it is essential to monitor the changes made by adapting and experimenting with new practices and document them.

In the retrospective meeting at the end of the spirit, the documentation gives detailed insights and knowledge about what went well and what can be improved, adjusted according to the feedback from the developers, tester, and stakeholders and to make the retrospective meeting more fun, creative and engaging, you can use innovative techniques such as gamification, storytelling, or use visual aids to make the retrospective more interactive and productive.

Conclusion

In summary, managing impediments and risks arising from automation testing during retrospectives is essential to achieving continuous improvement in the software development life cycle. The five-step approach offers a specific method to deal with challenges to establish an environment that promotes learning in the testing team.

The retrospective meeting provides a perfect opportunity to learn from the past, establish improvement areas, and collectively develop solutions. During the preparation and planning, teams elicit diverse perspectives through honest communication, thereby allowing for the prioritization of issues to be discussed. Fostering constructive engagement guarantees that the emphasis remains on workable enhancements rather than blame. Finally, the learnings from these retrospective meetings allow teams to progress and become better testers who can create top-notch software products.

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