The Benefits of Agile Testing | David Tzemach

While there is a separation between development and test teams in traditional testing, Agile testing is based on collaboration and cross-functional teams working towards a common goal without separating testers and developers.

As you can imagine, testing in the Agile environment has some built-in benefits that make it superior to traditional testing. Benefits like fast delivery, reduced development risk and improved overall quality.

Let’s review the main benefits of Agile testing:

Improved Quality

By testing the product incrementally and using test infrastructures such as CI/CD systems, the team can ensure that each release is tested to meet customer expectations.

In addition, Agile testing provides quick results in shorter cycles, increasing project quality visibility. This helps the development team take corrective actions to optimize product quality and performance when needed.

Communication and Collaboration

Agile teams should be cross-functional, which means that they should have all the technical capabilities to handle all aspects of testing. When an Agile team is built based on this approach, all team members, such as developers, testers, and architects, work as a single unit at the exact physical location. That increases collaboration and face-to-face communication (bypassing documentation processes) throughout the development lifecycle.

Collective Ownership of Testing

In the traditional test environment, testing was under the full responsibility of the testing team. In Agile Testing, the whole team is responsible for the quality, making each team member a potential contributor to the testing effort.

Increased Predictability

As part of any new development, the team also estimates testing effort for any functionality they intend to deliver. This helps the team produce accurate estimations because they estimate a small chunk of development instead of estimating testing effort for the whole project (which rarely reflects the proper timeline).

An Efficient Way to Handle Software Bugs

Agile testing provides a better approach to handling software bugs than traditional testing. In Agile testing, bugs are closed faster as part of the day-to-day coding and testing activities. Testers and developers sitting together in the exact physical location enables them to share immediate feedback without adding additional risk to the code.

Continuous Feedback Based on Incremental Releases

The iterative and incremental models of Agile help reduce the overall time between specifying requirements and releasing an incremental, tested version to the customer. This ensures that the team receives fast and continuous feedback about the quality of their deliveries rather than getting the same feedback after months or even years as in traditional software development.

Fewer Code Changes Between Fixes

In traditional development, the codebase can change multiple times between when a bug is detected and when a developer starts working on it. This can result in time for a developer trying to figure out how to reproduce a bug. In Agile, this scenario is less relevant because testing and coding activities are performed closely. Developers haven’t had enough time to change the code, making reproduction more difficult.

Testing Is an Integral Part of the Process and Can't Be Ignored.

Testing is done continuously throughout the software development life cycle; it can't be ignored or cut by much. This is one crucial thing in Agile testing; as in traditional projects, the testing phase is often missed to meet the deadlines.