Testing is quickly becoming as important as development, but one challenge every Agile team struggles with is speeding up testing cycles. While many have embraced modern tools to accelerate the testing lifecycle, they are not sufficient.
The Need for Speeding Up Testing Cycles
In today's digital era, testing is no longer a separate function. Carrying out testing after the development is over is also not an option. Testing must happen alongside development so that teams can detect bugs and issues in time. Since fixing bugs later in the development lifecycle can get very costly, teams are constantly looking to shift testing left.
In fact, teams that speed up testing cycles experience several benefits, such as:
- Quick identification and resolution of bugs – leading to superior code quality and optimized costs.
- Faster delivery and deployment of new features and changes – thus, better business agility, relevance, and competitiveness.
- Better and quicker risk assessment, helping organizations mitigate issues in time.
- An improved customer experience that directly impacts customer satisfaction and lifetime value.
The Challenges That Come in the Way
Given how complex software products are becoming, the testing process is also laden with several difficulties. To that end, let's look at the common roadblocks that come in the way of speeding up testing cycles:
- The sheer diversity in testing environments has made it extremely tough for testing teams to speed up testing cycles. With today’s mobile and web apps accessed from a multitude of devices and browsers, they must be thoroughly and rigorously tested across thousands of different permutations and combinations. Not only is this complex, but also extremely time-consuming.
- With Agile teams getting increasingly dispersed, the lack of proper and frequent communication creates several hurdles in the testing lifecycle. Communication gaps stemming from different time zones and the absence of the right tools tend to delay the testing cycle. They also restrict teams from formulating effective test cases.
- As end users expect software products to offer seamless omnichannel experiences, testing teams must guarantee top-notch performance in real-world conditions. But testing applications on real devices is easier said than done. Teams must prepare appropriate device labs to test products across a range of real-world scenarios. However, this demands huge investment and might not be economically feasible.
- Today’s software products need to cater to evolving trends and economic instability. However, this high degree of volatility comes in the way of speeding up testing cycles as teams find it difficult to test and deploy new features and updates continuously. The high reliance on manual testing approaches hinders speed while further delaying time-to-market.
The Top Ways to Speed Up Testing Cycles
There are several ways to speed up testing cycles and meet quality and time-to-market deadlines. Let's look at the top ones:
Leverage Automation
Automation is a great way to overcome mundane and error-prone repetitive testing tasks. With automation, you can minimize human intervention and reduce dependency on manual testing, thus overcoming issues such as wrong or duplicate data and missed steps. Automation can also help teams save time and money across the testing lifecycle through quicker and more accurate identification and resolution of bugs.
Take a Low-Code/No-Code Approach
Taking a low-code/no-code approach to testing is a great way to quickly curate test suites to meet diverse testing requirements. Such an approach can enable the reusability of code and scripts, enabling teams to run them repeatedly – without having to write new test cases from scratch - every time the codebase changes.
Embrace AI
Embracing AI capabilities can make the test process extremely intuitive and adaptable. Through predictive and self-healing capabilities, AI can reduce the pressure and stress testing teams are under. As a result, it allows them to focus on more strategic tasks.
Use Containerization
Taking a containerized approach to testing can help reduce the feedback loop between developers and testers. By separating different processes into different containers, teams can enable simultaneous testing across different configurations and environments. This can minimize conflicts and ensure the delivery of higher quality products and excellent customer experience.
Get Well-Versed with the Test Automation Pyramid
Teams looking to automate testing and speed up testing cycles need to first get well-versed with the test automation pyramid. By grouping tests into different categories and levels, teams can follow a pre-defined hierarchy while designing, executing, and evaluating tests – thus improving speed and quality.
Enable End-to-End Testing
Increasing test coverage via end-to-end testing is another way to easily test applications of any size and complexity. Such testing ensures the product is tested across different parameters. It also improves user privacy and business security through automated governance and control.
Build a Culture of Continuous Testing
A culture of continuous testing can help speed up testing cycles by allowing teams to conduct development and testing simultaneously.
Streamline Reporting
Streamlining the reporting process can help teams save precious time across the testing lifecycle. If teams can get their hands on advanced dashboards and reports at each step of the testing lifecycle, they can use them to make timely and accurate decisions and bring products to the market quickly.
Invest in a Modern Test Automation Platform
Investing in a modern test automation platform can reduce testing time by a significant margin. Automated and AI-enabled capabilities can minimize manual intervention in the testing process while also reducing the error margin.
The ACCELQ Advantage
ACCELQ offers a cloud-based test automation platform and is the ideal solution for speeding up testing cycles. Codeless and AI-enabled, ACCELQ takes a revolutionary approach to business assurance in any multi-cloud packaged environment. Using ACCELQ, testing teams can:
- Enable multi-channel test automation across a multitude of device-browser-OS combinations.
- Create a multitude of test suites and test cases and handle real-world complexities – without writing a single line of code.
- Take business process-focused automation for end-to-end quality assurance.
- Use a single platform to test across the entire enterprise technology stack and seamlessly meet all testing needs.
- Enable seamless collaboration between manual testers and automation engineers – without any technical barriers.
- Test code across different devices and browsers via the robust web, mobile, API, desktop, and backend testing.
- Seamlessly integrate the automation platform with other tools in the ecosystem for unmatched cross-functional testing.
- Improve visibility for Product Owners and QA Managers and streamline go/no-go decisions.
- Leverage intuitive self-healing capabilities and intelligently adapt to unexpected code changes.
- Effortlessly scale testing by getting teams started in a matter of minutes and meeting the organization’s growing needs.
- Get a visual blueprint of the application under test and develop advanced test scenarios with predictive analytics.
Speed Up Your Testing Cycles With ACCELQ
Organizations are constantly looking to level up to ensure they can bring products into the market with speed and quality. But the growing complexity of software products, lack of communication, and surging browser-device combinations make the testing lifecycle extremely sluggish.
If you want to accelerate the go-to-market without missing out on quality metrics, you need to embrace novel ways to speed up testing. A test automation platform like ACCELQ can do wonders to speed up your testing cycles. Simple to adopt and easy to use, the platform can turbocharge your testing process and pave the way for sustainable automation with no technical barriers.
Contact ACCELQ today to get started on your codeless test automation journey and improve test automation outcomes!
GEOSLEY ANDRADES
Director, Product Evangelist at ACCELQ.
Being a Test Automation enthusiast, Geosley helps provide ACCELQ with innovative solutions to transform test automation to be simpler, more reliable, and sustainable for the real world. As a passionate Community Builder, Geosley drives Q Community – A Global Community of Test Automation enthusiasts, empowering testers to embrace Test Automation and helping them solve real-life complex testing challenges.
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