With more enterprises transitioning their software development initiatives into the agile mode, the popularity of agile testing is soaring. In fact, studies estimate the global demand for agile development and testing to be worth over $30 billion by 2026.
On one side, consumers are increasingly demanding faster and more powerful digital experiences across all touchpoints. On the other, employees need to be empowered with the right digital capabilities to always meet or exceed customer expectations.
Since both these fronts involve software-driven initiatives, enterprise application development is a core element of any modern business, irrespective of size or scale. As application development scales the agile route, agile testing becomes the mainstay.
Ready to Get Started?
Let our team experts walk you through how ACCELQ can assist you in achieving a true continuous testing automation
What Is Agile Testing?
Enterprises are increasingly transitioning their development philosophy into a productized approach to succeed in a digital-first world. This results in continuous updates and evolution in alignment with market trends. In other words, they have adopted the agile mode of software development for progressive growth.
Traditional testing approaches do not work well with agile principles. Hence, the concept of agile testing makes its presence felt in modern application development projects. In simple terms, agile testing refers to the incremental approach to testing the software developed following an agile approach. It depends considerably on provisioning customer feedback, keeping sophistication at bay, promoting flexible and adaptable development. As a result, agile testing enables a complete and error-free version to be deployed finally for end-users.
More so, it deviates considerably from the traditional testing approach. The latter is where the test engineers work on validating an application after the completion of development. For every iteration, test engineers work to include as many tests as possible to ensure rapid verification.
SUGGESTED READ - What Is Agile Methodology? A Quick Guide
The Top Agile Testing Trends to Watch in 2023
We have seen how agile testing is making waves in the enterprise technology sector. For businesses that are in their maiden journey in agile transformation and testing approach change, here are the top agile testing trends to watch in 2023:
The Transition from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering
Software testing in an agile environment is quickly deviating from its traditional mode of slow and manual testing. In other words, testers must now engineer test cases for continuous testing of applications. They can leverage automation to make their jobs easier.
With continuous testing, there is also the availability of continuous feedback. When continuous testing is preached as part of agile testing for various usage scenarios, quick feedback can be delivered to the development teams. This helps in the rapid rectification of problems. The early feedback cycle helps improve the overall quality and eliminate the software failure.
Shift-Left Approach
Another prominent agile testing trend in 2023 will be the adoption of shift-left testing in more mainstream application development projects. In the shift-left approach, testing is moved towards the formative stages of development rather than incorporating testing after development. It works on the motto of testing early and testing often. This allows test engineers to explore in more detail in every iterative testing phase as they deal with a smaller block of code or features every time rather than the entire end-to-end application.
This approach has numerous advantages. For example:
- Faster market release for applications or their features
- Early discovery and rectification of defects that can be highly disruptive or result in software failure during its regular operations.
Steady Growth in DevOps
A decade ago, DevOps was rarely heard in the corporate world. Today, it is at the heart of almost all enterprise digital roadmaps. From ironing out differences between operations and development teams to enabling continuous delivery, DevOps has become a crucial part of modern software development practices.
In 2023, the growth of DevOps will sustain its momentum as more enterprises continue their journey of leveraging digital as a primary business channel. DevOps testing will prove a critical part of this growth journey to ensure that rapid development and deployment practices do not hurt product quality by any chance.
Automation
The rapid growth of enterprise technology, especially via the SaaS route, calls for automation across the entire spectrum of development, deployment, and testing. From an agile testing perspective, there is a need to bring onboard tools and platforms that can help with end-to-end test automation.
To realize goals of enabling efficiency and reliability, especially for cloud testing applications, automation will be a critical component. Choosing the right automation tool will be a key metric in evaluating the success of test efforts.
Why Should Enterprises Adopt an Agile Testing Strategy for Success?
Gartner expects that nearly 95% of all new digital workloads will be on the cloud by 2025. The accelerated shift to SaaS and the widespread use of agile principles to set up new-age productized digital services will combine to present a sizeable opportunity for agile testing. To that end, the traditional approaches to testing will not be able to seamlessly categorize, automate and leverage the right tools to handle end-to-end testing management. In essence, agile testing is the need of the hour as enterprises seek to transform their digital experience significantly.
Bringing testing on par with development is the real challenge that most enterprises will be desperate to solve. By correctly applying agile principles, enterprises can build a strong and reliable foundation for their digital products. At ACCELQ, we develop custom test automation products that help establish agile testing goals across your enterprise’s digital landscape.
Get in touch with us to know more about test automation and how ACCELQ can help deliver a competitive advantage to your digital landscape through quality engineering supported by our world-class automation products and framework.