What is Agile Testing Life Cycle: All You Need to Know

What is agile testing?

What is the agile testing life cycle?

The agile testing life cycle spans across four stages:

Iteration 0:

During the first stage or Iteration 0, initial setup tasks are performed. This includes identifying the testing team, installing testing tools, scheduling resources (such as availability of testing labs), and more. The following steps are set to be achieved in Iteration 0:

• Establish a business case for the project.
• Determine boundary conditions and project scope.
• Outline key requirements and use cases that will drive design trade-offs.
• Outline one or more candidate architectures.
• Identify risks.
• Estimate costs and prepare the initial project.

Construction Iterations: T

The second stage of agile testing is the construction iterations, where most of the testing takes place. This stage is seen as a set of iterations to build increments of the solution. To achieve this, the agile team implements a mix of practices from XP, Scrum, Agile Modeling, Agile Data, and more.

In the construction iterations, the agile team follows the practice of prioritized requirements: in each iteration, they pull the most fundamental requirements from the work item stack and implement them.

Confirmation testing focuses on verifying if the system meets the stakeholders' intentions as described to the team so far and is performed by the team. Exploration testing, on the other hand, identifies potential issues in the form of defect stories when it detects problems that the confirming team may have skipped or overlooked. Exploration testing deals with common concerns like integration testing, load/stress testing, security testing, etc.

Similarly, confirmation testing has two aspects: developer testing and agile acceptance testing. Both are automated and enable continuous regression testing throughout the lifecycle. Confirmation testing is the agile equivalent of testing specifications.

Agile acceptance testing combines traditional functional testing with traditional acceptance testing and is done collaboratively by the development team and stakeholders. Developer testing is a mix of traditional unit testing and traditional service integration testing and verifies the application code and database schema.

Release and Transition:

The goal of the "Release and Transition" stage is to successfully deploy your system into the production environment. Activities in this stage include training end users, support staff, and operators. Additionally, it includes marketing the product release, backup and recovery, and finalizing system and user documentation.

The final stage of the agile testing approach includes comprehensive system testing and acceptance testing. To smoothly transition into the final testing stage, you should have subjected it to more rigorous testing during the construction iterations. At the end of the game, testers will investigate their defect stories.

Production:

After the release stage, the product enters the production phase.

Overall, the agile testing life cycle encompasses initial setup, construction iterations, release and transition, and the production phase. It emphasizes iterative development, continuous testing, and collaboration between the development team and stakeholders throughout the process.

Conclusion

Agile testing involves testing early in the software development lifecycle. It requires a high level of customer involvement and testing of the code once it is launched. The code should be stable enough for system testing. Extensive regression testing can be performed to ensure that bugs have been fixed and tested.

Meanwhile, Automation plays an important role in agile testing by accelerating feedback loops, supporting continuous integration and delivery, and improving test efficiency and accuracy, while facilitating team collaboration and sustainability. All of which are needed by agile development teams. If you are looking for more automated testing solutions, consider WeTest automation, an efficient and quality service that allows your software to meet delivery standards faster.