APRIL 27, 2016 // By Adrian Kearns
Agile adoption is a rewarding journey and most companies I encounter are at some stage of that path. Some companies are implementing agile on a project-by-project basis complete with empowered and engaged product owners and collaborative development teams that produce shippable “products” in regular sprints. Others break agile into pieces, picking and choosing what to implement. This is where we get processes like Scrummerfall (ScrummerFAIL?) which aren’t necessarily agile, are at least moving towards iterative/collaborative development. Agile can be challenging and the adoption roadmap will be different for each company.
With the idea of adoption-as-a-journey, let’s look at whether you can be agile with all manual processes. I’ll admit that when I introduced this topic around Magenic it definitely raised a few eyebrows and I certainly hope it raised yours. It’s not an indictment, but rather a reminder: because agile is a team effort and can be a trying journey, you owe it to the development team and the business to continue striving for Quality with Speed in your software development. Part of that is to empower your team with tools that help them deliver high-quality software in less time. Automation is exactly that kind of tool.
Want an example of automation in action? Here is a recent project we completed for a large fleet management company. After missing the mark on three prior attempts implementing automation they reached out to Magenic for help. This is a company that needed Speed with Quality and we were able to deliver some great results.
- Web Services
o 95% of test coverage automated
o Full regression testing every release
o Went from 300 manual tests to 30,000 automated tests
- Reports Testing Tool
o 70% of manual effort automated
o 98% of test coverage automated
o Testing in multiple environments
o Side by side results comparison
o Tracking results over time
- UI Automation
o 25% test coverage automated
o 75% smoke test coverage automated
o 1/8 of Regression tests run daily
o Smoke tests run daily with cross browser/OS combinations
o Cross Browser/OS, Performance, Load, and Stress testing - Not even possible without an automation tool
You can read more about it here: Automating QA Testing After Multiple Failed Attempts
Without the use of automated tools, this team would have missed an opportunity to streamline its process and learn from the experiences of the previous sprint. Using automation not only makes the team move faster, but it surfaces problems and bugs earlier so the team can stay on top of them rather than scrambling in the last days of the sprint. This also helped to surfaces challenges earlier so that the business could make decisions and keep the team focused on the highest value work.
Keep on striving towards the goal of agile adoption and don’t forget there are a lot of tools you can use along the way.
If you’d like to contact Magenic directly, email us or call us at 877-277-1044.