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In the age-old battle between speed and quality for software applications, there is hard, if any, the possibility of a win-win situation. However, agile teams that use automated testing practices have figured out a way to achieve the optimal balance between two of the crucial factors. The fundamental aim of the quality assurance and testing processes is to meticulously monitor the application development activities and outcomes and places a high value on careful consideration over defects and bugs in the system for the benefit of speed. Despite this, organizations still struggle with making the testing process rapid enough to meet the requirements of the changing landscape of the customer market and agile development principles without skipping the critical steps of quality assurance.

Within the fast-paced world of software testing, project managers and teams face challenges coming at them from all possible angles; from the increasing pressure to reduce the time to market, pressure from the upper management to detect and resolve issues faster, to the addition of multi-dimensional functionality into increasingly complex and intricate applications. For cases like this, the managers and project teams usually succumb to the pressure and tend to compromise on the depth and breadth of testing in order to shrink release cycles and launch the software products faster. Therefore, it is important for the organizations to introduce end to end testing solutions into the system to mitigate the defect escape rate, and to evaluate the system and its components thoroughly to gauge if they satisfy the user requirements. In the agile development environment where there is an increasing emphasis on short release cycles, the role of automation testing companies becomes indispensable. They derive efficient methods and implementation techniques to make the testing and development teams more productive and to ensure that the testing processes are much quicker and cost-effective.

There are some essential tips for the automation testing companies to keep into account in order to speed up the testing cycles without making a compromise on the quality.

1.     Parallel Testing – Instead of conducting tests in a sequential manner, in which case there are many bottlenecks that the testing teams have to overcome, test managers can execute two or more test cases concurrently in an effort to save time, and in some cases costs as well. As opposed to the manual testing approach, adopting automated testing aspects into the business allows the project managers to facilitate the parallel testing process easily. Even though parallel testing can pose some challenges to the testing team as they can run interference with each other if they are referencing the same browser resources, these challenges can be overcome with an automated testing approach. It enables and arms the test managers with the right techniques and approaches to execute test cases much faster and is essentially their ticket to shorter testing cycles.
2.     Being organized is the key – maintaining the test cases and issues in the application system in an organized manner may not seem important for day to day testing activities, however, in the longer term, it essentially streamlines the entire quality assurance and testing process. Automation testing companies use resources at their disposal to keep their test cases lean and in a reusable state so that they are still relevant for future projects. An organized testing system also enables the test managers to practice good test management practices, maintain accurate data, and generate comprehensive and in-depth reports. Usually, the organization of the test cases is the last thing on the mind of the managers and project teams, however, they save a lot of time for the development and testing teams and make the entire process much smoother.
3.     Identification and reduction of flaky tests – despite the fact that the goal of test managers is essential to identify all possible defects and issues in the system, it can also lead to increased flakiness. False negatives in the testing outcomes tend to slow down the project teams and obscures them from meeting their project deadlines. Flaky tests can cut down on the benefits of an automated bug detection system, as the automated test suite is only useful for the test managers when it is reliable, dependable, and it gives timely alerts to the team.
4.     Running tests in short-lived environments – for agile teams that have incorporated continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines into their system, it is imperative that they use a clean testing environment for every new test case so that there are no residual effects from the previous tests. The idea behind this approach is to start and execute every test case with a new slate so that the results of previous tests have no bearing on the outcome of the new test case. Ideally, this means that the test managers use a temporary test environment for a test case which can be immediately discarded after the test case has been executed and the reports are generated.
5.     Establishing a centralized database or repository for all test cases – in the software development environment, where the developers and testers are all working on multiple things at the same, it can become challenging for the test managers to keep a track of all test cases and monitor them. By maintaining a centralized repository that can be accessed by all team members, pertinent information and data regarding the test cases can be logged in the database from multiple sources to provide better visibility and traceability to the manager. This also allows them to assign resources to the test cases accordingly.

Conclusion

Automation is a critical aspect of the software application development lifecycle, including the testing process as well. It not only improves the quality and accuracy of the tests with wide test coverage, but it also allows the test managers to achieve better speed and return on investment by following the best practices. With the help of automated testing and other techniques of agile approaches, organizations are able to optimize their testing procedures.