Agile Testing Solutions and Where to Find Them

As technology has evolved, everything from a testing perspective has grown in size and complexity. Everything from the number of devices in your testing matrix, to the size of your customer footprint, to the number of platforms (e.g. cloud, mobile, etc.) your software runs on, all has grown considerably over the years.

This has created an immensely complex digital ecosystem and drastically increased the amount of test coverage needed for a company to deliver a seamless digital experience. What hasn’t grown – and has actually decreased significantly – is the amount of time available to test this broad matrix of testing cases.

While testing methodologies have evolved, companies still find themselves struggling to keep up with the pace of Agile development. In-house QA teams remain a fixture in the Agile testing process, but as everything in the digital environment grows in size and complexity, in-house teams remain largely the same, leaving a gap in test coverage. Something has to give and quality is usually the piece that suffers. So much so that 60% of companies feel they are not confident in their level of code coverage, according to Applause research. That cannot continue.

Keys to Holistic QA Testing

For companies to succeed, they cannot maintain the status quo in their testing strategies. They must adopt a holistic testing strategy, but how do they get there?

Introduce Automation into the SDLC

For a company to maintain a true Agile cadence, test automation, beyond unit, functional and smoke tests, must be baked into their overall QA strategy. With the number of testing variables growing by the day, achieving the desired level of test coverage is impossible using strictly manual functional testing. By introducing test automation, you eliminate time spent on stable test cases and enable your team to focus on more edge cases and manual exploratory testing.

Test in the Wild

Software is embedded into every facet of your lives. There is no longer a designated environment for consumers to shop, watch television, or do any number of things. Software is accessible from almost anywhere, so it should be tested in those locations as well to capture the true customer journey and all of the variables that go along with it.

To account for the growing number of testing variables (e.g. devices, operating systems, etc.), companies often resort to running simulations to cover the desired test cases. This may give companies a general understanding of whether their software is functioning, but it does so in an idealistic environment.

To test effectively and beyond the “happy path” that internal testers often resort to, companies need to retrieve feedback from real-world environments, with real people, on their own devices. This not only validates the unique environments that consumers encounter, but it gathers feedback on their experience. Today, there is nothing more valuable than the consumer experience.

Looking Outward to Achieve Testing Excellence

You may be asking yourself, how can I employ these testing methods quickly without a significantly larger team? The short answer is you can’t – not through your own in-house resources. Companies must look outward to support this effort.

For a long while, companies resorted to offshoring as an external solution to their scalability. However, offshoring has revealed many gaps in supporting these holistic testing efforts – namely feedback quality and speed. Instead, companies are looking to add crowdtesting solutions to accomplish their overall testing needs.

Through crowdtesting solutions like Applause, companies can effectively scale their testing operations quickly without incurring additional overhead costs, while increasing coverage at scale. Additional testing resources can allow for in-house teams to focus on automation while leaving manual test cases to the testing community.

While size is certainly important in adjusting to today’s testing demands, it is only part of the equation. Additional testing resources can only help so far as how they are utilized. If used to accomplished to complement a holistic testing strategy, results are sure to follow.

As demonstrated in the chart above, Applause’s crowdtesting solutions are a seamless fit into any company’s SDLC. With support in test strategy development, test case execution, test case authoring, and more, companies can quickly reach that holistic strategy they have been striving to achieve.