The transition to agile impacts an entire organization and comes with its own set of challenges. When an organization or just a team transform from their existing way of working to Agile practices, the complexity of the transformation can be overwhelming at times. With extensive agile coaching, an organization’s product development agility can be improved. In this infographic, we will discuss the

5 key benefits of Agile coaching that enterprises may have never considered.

 Download this infographic here

The post 5 Key Benefits Of Agile Coaching Every Enterprise MUST Know- Infographic first appeared on TestingXperts.

Is your organization on the road to “going Agile”, but is confused with the level of changes involved? Have you already “gone Agile” but are not witnessing the anticipated results?

Contents 1. What-is-Agile-coaching 2. Benefits-of-Agile-Coaching 3. Conclusion

What is Agile coaching

The transition to agile impacts an entire organization and comes with its own set of challenges. When an organization or just a team transform from their existing way of working to Agile practices, the complexity of the transformation can be overwhelming at times. If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you would identify the importance of having a professional Agile coach to improve collaboration and increase efficiency, empowering you to derive optimum benefits from the agile framework.

With extensive Agile coaching, an organization’s product development agility can be improved. Here are 5 key benefits of Agile coaching that you may have never considered:

Benefits-of-Agile-Coaching

Immediate application: An exceptional Agile training program can offer a great jumpstart to an organization looking to implement agile methods in their current workflow with hand-holding on all Agile working best practices. The early days are most difficult and the coach can really help keep team’s effort on track.

Better Collaboration: An experienced Agile coach brings integrated methods for teams working across geographies and distinct cultures, but having a common agile interest.  A collective set of definitions that best elucidate agile terminologies and working practices can create an effective communication channel throughout the organization.

Improved Communication: Communicating the need for agile methodology is essential to inspire teams to embrace, scale-up, and thrive on agile methods. A coach builds out a vision showcasing the intrinsic worth of agile, how it develops the process and bolsters the engagement with customers. A coach will strengthen the need for communication as the basic foundation of Agile methodology.

Transformation Backlog: An Agile transformation must be piloted like an Agile project, which creates the need for a coach to create a transformation backlog. The transformation backlog is a list of work items created by a coach to evolve an organization into an Agile process. It can also be used to highlight major developments in the Agile process.

Continual Improvement: Corresponding to the importance of agile implementation is the continuous need to measure the organizational growth that agile adoption brings with itself. A coach forms a set of metrics to assess the amount of Agile adoption and also looks continuously at refining the practices. That’s how teams grow into becoming high performing Agile units.

Conclusion

Agile coaching is a sound investment for the organization in terms of time and money. As agile coaches bring the certified, as well as brand new practices and processes, there is a substantial value addition to the organizations. TestingXperts has created a complete support structure of agile coaches and consultants who work together and help organizations in successfully adopting and refining agile methods. Organizations working towards improving their agile practices can successfully navigate challenges and apply agile principles to real-world scenarios.

Connect with us and make your organization implement agile best practices, promote team collaboration, and design programs that enable you to respond to varying market conditions with ease and confidence.

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Test data management (TDM) is a critical activity in the testing lifecycle. And this is undergoing continuous refinement with constant changes in the technology landscape and application development process.

Contents 1. Effective Test Data Management Strategy 2. Big Data 3. Service Virtualization 4. DevOps Practices 5. Agile Methodology 6. Conclusion

TDM is highly critical in the testing lifecycle, as the quantum of data generated while testing is massive. Automating the test data helps in minimizing the time spent on processing the data, generating reports faster. However, some key trends have been empowering the TDM strategy. These key trends must be considered while creating an effective test data strategy to reduce time-to-market and improve efficiency. Let’s discuss these trends.

Effective Test Data Management Strategy

Big Data

Big data is a growing technology-driven program, and its strategic significance is growing gradually. With the rapid increase in the adoption of big data, test data architects need continuous data privacy and security solutions. Due to rising breach cases, IT organizations need to expand their data privacy and regulatory compliance initiative by including development and testing environments into the scope. In the current scenario, testing a big data application has become a challenge due to lack of proven test frameworks and toolsets. To set this right, test architects must manage test data and regulatory compliance in their test data strategy.

Service Virtualization

In the world of agile and DevOps, testing the applications need accurate, reliable, and comprehensive test environments. While this can be challenging, testers must execute integration tests on the application with various code versions and test data combinations. Therefore, test data architects need solutions to virtualize application behavior with predefined test data combination. Various organizations are leveraging service virtualization with proper test data configuration as a technique to minimalize costs in the non-production environment.

DevOps Practices

The implementation of DevOps practice promotes collaboration across teams involved in the software development lifecycle. The product, as well as test managers, deliver software in quick cycles and of high quality by continuous integration. A test data architect should leverage database virtualization in TDM for faster provisioning of non-production forms of databases virtually.

Agile Methodology

Agile delivery methods necessitate delivery within shorter delivery cycles with high quality. In every agile sprint, the test teams build, run, and automate tests for which the test data management teams execute data refresh and provide the test data needed to perform the tests. The ideal situation for a test data architect is to ensure optimal data sets with maximum test coverage. This solution helps in completing the testing on time.

Conclusion

Concisely, Test Data Management architects and consultants must be aware of the impact of these major trends on their existing test data strategy. Equipped with this information, they must modify their test data strategy with effective solutions, such as service virtualization, to integrate an ultramodern vision into their Test Data Management strategy. Test data is often generated using existing data. Therefore, the data must be kept confidential to protect the individual’s interest or business interests. Securing the test data is important based on the criticality of the application under test.

At TestingXperts, we have employed robust test data management practices for intricate enterprise platforms. Connect with our experts to improve test effectiveness by using accurate test data and institutionalizing the entire test data management process.

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Software testing industry has witnessed a tremendous evolution in the last few years. The methodologies and practices of software testing are on a continuous transformation. With the incessant need for QA, software testing industry is coming up with more intellectual trends in the coming year. In this infographic, we will discuss the emerging software testing trends that will rule 2018.

Software Testing Trends 2018

The post 6 Emerging Software Testing Trends that will Rule 2018- Infographic first appeared on TestingXperts.

Agile methodology has transformed the software industry completely. Every organization is adopting agile in various forms and shapes to align with their business needs and to achieve their ultimate goal of being accessible to the market needs and end users. Therefore, agile methodologies are being executed in several ways. These days, agile methodology is perceived as a quick, responsive, and a flexible software development method. As a result, many companies have customized Agile Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to suit their needs.

Contents 1. Agile Methodology: Effective Transformation in Testing 2. Benefits of Agile Methodology 3. Conclusion

Agile methodology: Effective Transformation in Testing

However, with the passage of time, and the changing user requirements, testing became an important and the most significant aspect of the agile methodology. All these years, testing teams have been contributing to the agile methodology and have evolved immensely.

Here is the list of progressions made by the testing team from several perspectives:

Benefits of Agile Methodology

1. Great collaboration and complete involvement with the whole team: By shifting left in the development lifecycle give a chance to the testers to collaborate with the rest of the product team rather than just being an isolated entity that enters the phase just before the release. This value addition by the testers has revealed the evolution of their work and how they have become a great help to the other teams by collaborating with them.

2. Better-quality work with the best methods: The focus on test automation has helped testers in giving up repetitive tasks from their plates which were earlier done manually. This has given testers more time to analyze and perform better and bigger things such as competitive analysis; business needs accomplishments, end-user feedback analysis, etc.

3. Recognition for the work they do: Testing teams have their own accountability and have a better reputation than ever before. Nowadays, testers are involved in the project right from its production planning and designing stages, the development teams and the testers work together to bring out a better deliverable in lesser time. This level of contribution polish their skills and bring out their best in consideration that they were earlier not a part of.

4. Stronger connection with end users: With the understanding that in an Agile program, the product team as a whole is more accessible and involved with end users, testers as end-user representatives on the team have enormous potential to the front-end with users, be it usability studies, beta programs or product demos, etc. Currently, testers have a better understanding of the product from an end-user viewpoint which helps them get better in their own roles.

Finally and most importantly, agile has helped the testers to build quality with speed and contribute to the project in their own way.

TestingXperts with its expertise and extensive experience in agile methodology has been able to deliver high-quality projects within a shorter duration. Our software testing experts employ industry best agile and DevOps practices, in-house developed intelligent frameworks and processes that enhance the client’s processes to enhance process predictability and performance in the long run.

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Today’s fast-paced technology-centric world presents opportunities and threats at every turn. It has become challenging to practice agile development no matter how big or small an organization you are. To become sustainable in this disruptive environment, agility is key.

Contents 1. How to bring Agility into your organization and how to survive? 2. Conclusion

Let us have a look at the 6 most effective ways an organization can achieve business agility.

How to bring Agility into your organization and how to survive?

1. Scalability To deliver customer satisfaction, there is a need for a reliable value-delivery engine aligned with top business priorities, giving you fast and predictable implementation across the entire software development lifecycle. Waterfall teams are unable to deliver faster, as required by the enterprises these days.

2. Performance Bringing agility into your organization means sensing and adapting to change rapidly and confidently. Building responsiveness into your organization’s DNA is important, in order to take a disciplined approach to managing change, for which business agility is critical. Delivery is the origin for bringing agility. Improving cycle time can significantly affect your end result. Agility helps in fulfilling customer requirements early and often, assuring that you are building the right products.

3. Adaptive Planning Funding and scope are two key factors that can allow your business to move and build responsiveness. Establishing a consistent planning speed can help enterprises decrease risk and increase investor confidence.

4. Growth It is observed that most enterprises spend approximately 15% of their budget on innovation. However, highly effective organizations allocate at least 50% of their budget on growth initiatives. By increasing speed, productivity and quality, you can spend fewer resources on fixing bugs, technical debt and refactoring. Agility helps in making the right decisions with confidence.

5. Bring Change In order to nurture growth and innovation, it is important to follow a deliberate approach to investments in innovation. Business agility helps in connecting horizon investments and disciplined exploration with the principle of fail fast and fail cheap.

6. Organize around Customer Value It is important to connect with the market, customers and stakeholders. For this, breaking down functional silos is important, as it helps in improving collaboration, minimizing dependencies and reducing waste. It helps in allowing you to respond to opportunities and threats rapidly and confidently.

Scaling helps in organizing around customer value at the delivery level by creating teams that are aligned with common release objectives. Scaling also helps in ensuring the business to identify the true value of your agile developments.

Conclusion

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The world is getting more and more connected with each passing day. It is believed that around 30 billion independent things will be connected to the internet by 2020. Now, with this pressure to move at a greater speed, the biggest stumbling block is to identify how to build a continuous approach to testing across multiple channels of engagement.

Contents 1. API Testing 2. What are the benefits of API testing? 3. Challenges of API Testing 4. How to Overcome API Testing Challenges 5. What type of bugs are identified with API testing? 6. What are the tools for API testing? 7. Conclusion

API Testing

The consumerization of IT is changing how applications are being developed. Rather than building a single, monolithic system installed on a server in a back office, modern applications are distributed within mobile devices and web browsers so users can gain access to services from anywhere and at any time. Modern applications are no longer autonomous; they comprise several service components tied together at runtime.

As a result, the end-user experience is not driven by the well-designed user interfaces we all use, but by application programming interfaces (APIs) that expedite interactions between applications, code modules, and back-end systems.

What are the benefits of API testing?

1. Completely Language-Independent:In API testing, there are several data transfer modes, the data can be exchanged using JSON or XML. Since these languages are used for development and are technology-independent, the teams can select any core language while performing the API tests.

2. Helps for Integrated User Experience: With API, embedding the content from any application or website is easier. This way of ease in delivering information is an important benefit as it helps to maintain an integrated user experience.

3. Protects from vulnerabilities and code breakage: API testing effectively helps to eliminate the vulnerabilities with its excellent conditions and inputs. These help in protecting the application from vulnerabilities caused due to the insertion of unknown code or due to code breakage. 

4. Reduces testing time: The methodologies of API testing are excellent to minimize the time consumption. Unlike validation and functional testing, API testing is faster in performing more number of tests. 

5. Increases Developers Productivity: For writing any code, there are very few instances where the developers start from a scratch. While designing API, there is a code base provided to help the time consumption of developers in writing code. This existing code base helps in limiting the differentiation in the code among the developers and also eliminates the time needed for creating new code.

6. Faster results at less cost: In API testing, there is no need for using large codes. By using the lesser code which is less than the GUI automated tests, these tests help to provide easier and faster test results with better test coverage. This results in achieving faster results at reduced testing costs. Also, the faster detection of errors helps in reducing the cost involved for manual testing. 

The API is the intelligence behind this connected world. APIs allow companies to become more agile, and to work together in an integrated manner. However, while testing APIs, testers face several units of work, making it challenging for the testers to test the APIs. Below are the four major challenges experienced while testing APIs along with and suggested solutions.

Challenges of API Testing

1) Use case propagation

Traditional UI testing is limited to the testing functionality of the overall application. A tester construes the output against expected outcomes after exercising an input. However, API testing follows a different approach. Being the central hub of logic and the gateway to data for interfacing applications, use cases are near-infinite in API testing. Consequently, the number of required tests rapidly exceeds the competences of the technical staff responsible for test case design.

2) Access to connected systems

APIs pull data from multiple APIs and back-end systems, in which the resulting architecture looks like the roots of a tree extending wide and deep. Thus, it’s impossible to have access to every environment on this tree. The emulation of inaccessible resources is the key to avoiding testing bottlenecks. However, the old way of building custom mocks is proving too challenging. Besides, they cannot emulate race conditions for comprehensive performance and load testing.

3) Synchronous and asynchronous methods

Modern applications are intricate, and one API can link several microservices and other APIs. Accordingly, a single call on an API can prompt ‘n’ number of serial and parallel activities. The intricacies of an API can thus grow exponentially as it is combined with other API calls. And this complexity multiplies as testers feature in the calling order of APIs in test case design. Consequently, testing APIs must be managed in both separate and nuclear units of work.

4) API versioning

Versioning is a primary cause of rising complexity in API testing. Most systems have a degree of depreciation, which should be managed by an API with the help of versioning. The API must identify missing values and allocate some default to allow the old version to work. Moreover, it can be the case that some versions are called by some versions but not others.

How to Overcome API Testing Challenges

To overcome the above-listed challenges, a modern approach should be adopted that enables you to automate API tests and integrate them into a continuous delivery cycle.

Phase I: Integration level Testing

The integration test phase will focus on service interfaces and will make sure interface behavior and information sharing are working as specified.

Phase II: Process/Orchestration Testing

This phase covers:

• Business logic
• Sequencing
• Exception handling
• Process decomposition (including service and process reuse)

Phase III: Security and Governance Testing

In this phase, SOA / API is combined with Government and Regulatory compliance, which is incorporated into the entire project life cycle. This phase comprises Quality of Service policies on Performance, Security, and Transactions.

• Regulatory policies
• Business policies
• Audit policies
• Infrastructure policies

Phase IV: System Level Testing

This test phase will cover whether the technical solution met the defined business acceptance criteria.

What type of bugs are identified with API testing?

Identifies bugs related to Authentication: With API testing, it is easier to trigger the bugs raised because of entering unacceptable characters in the apps authentication field. Though the bugs are not considered as severe for the application, it can sometimes lead to app destruction. 

Resolves the issue of Browser Adaptability: For any application, browser adaptability is one of the important needs. If the application fails to respond to any browser, then it can lead to dissatisfaction among the users and affect the brand reputation. Hence, by adopting the methods of API testing, it becomes simpler to identify and resolve the issues related to the app’s ability across browsers.

Identifies configuration errors on all devices: It is necessary for the apps to be compatible across the devices. If the app is unable to meet any device resolution, then this can raise complications for the app’s future and user’s interest. With API testing, it becomes easier to find out whether the app is compatible across devices and browsers to target the audience. 

Finds the bugs related to accessibility: Users always prefer apps that are user-friendly and provide a simplified understanding of the app usage. Hence, it is essential to know the importance of adding the menu, help, and search sections on the homepage. An easily accessible app is always a top choice for users.

What are the tools for API testing?

Open-Source API Testing Tools:

• JMeter
• Rest-Assured
• Karate DSL
• Citrus Framework
• Parasoft SOAtest
• Rest Assured  
• Tricentis

Commercial API Testing Tools:

• Katalon Studio
• SoapUI
• Postman
• Apigee

Conclusion

TestingXperts is proficient in a wide range of API protocols such as XML, SOAP, JSON, REST, Gdata, YAML, ATOM, RSS, and RDF, etc. Our end to end applications validation experience at various layers of the application helps in executing a successful API. Our expertise in leading industry tools for API testing for functional, load and security testing allows us to automate API test cases.

The post Top 4 Challenges of API Testing and How to Overcome Them first appeared on TestingXperts.

Every enterprise trying to succeed in the digital economy is seeking for two things: speed and scalability. If it’s important for a company to get to market faster, it’s equally important to be able to scale up appropriately to support increasing customer demand. But the key motto that should be followed here is speed and security at scale.

Contents 1. What are Microservices? 2. How can an enterprise benefit from microservices? 3. Testing Microservices 4. Conclusion

Agile and DevOps models support distributed and decentralized ownership of software assets and promote faster turnaround of changes and rapid deployment. However, to skillfully segregate complex, monolithic applications into independent units, a design strategy namely “Microservices” is essential.

Monolithic applications were once effective in the digital economy, but not anymore. Development teams across enterprises have been struggling hard to deal with large applications pertaining to deployment, development time, and scalability. With the extensive adoption of DevOps frameworks and agile methodologies, development teams felt the necessity to break down complex application silos into simpler code blocks, which enlightens microservices.

Microservices has successfully made its mark in the software architecture market. The Microservices architecture differs from the traditional monolithic architecture where the application was built as a single entity. However the monolithic architecture is rather sound, obstructions around it are building precisely when almost all applications are being deployed on the cloud platform. Microservices architecture constitutes an integrated skelton where rather than plugging the components together, the software is fragmented by breaking it down into services.

By fragmenting a big application into microservices, development teams become more active with updates and deployments. Whereas, it also removes dependencies to create complex and large builds, by eliminating the need for over-sophisticated architectures.

Every enterprise has different needs; there can be times when microservices would be a good solution and, times when a monolithic application would make more sense.

For enterprises on a digital transformation journey, with the need to be agile, implementing a microservices architecture has several advantages in the app economy.

1. Easier to scale: In the microservices architecture, only the components that need improved scalability are affected, than the entire app. This also provides substantial cost savings to the enterprise.

2. A Grander architecture for larger applications: In this architecture, components can be built or swapped at will without having an impact on the entire application. In this case, if something goes wrong, only that component is affected.

3. Agility is the key: Microservices architecture provides more agility and makes it easier to pivot segments of an application.

However, microservices based applications also have:

1. Trouble testing the entire API app but becomes far easier to test individual components. 2. Extra moving parts than a monolithic app, which becomes difficult to monitor. 3. Extra modern back-end infrastructure requirements to the growing codebase.

Evidently, the testing strategy that is applied to the traditional monolithic application needs to change with the shift to microservices. Considering that applications that are built in the microservices architecture offer high performance and functionality, testing has to cover each layer of the service. A microservices architecture comprises of small, focused services that create a whole application together. Each illustration of a microservices represents a distinct responsibility within the application. The actual advantage is these services are independent of each other, which makes them independently testable. However, due to the disseminated environment of microservices development, testing can often become a challenge. Some of the challenges are given below:

• Accessibility of a dedicated test environment since development is agile and not integrated.

• Recognizing the right amount of testing each time in the test lifecycle

• Complex extraction logs during testing and data validation

Conclusion

Today’s DevOps and Agile-focused enterprises are endeavoring for fast changes and quick deployments. Microservices architecture is a boon to all these companies. Organizations can facilitate smaller development teams with more objectivity and agility, resulting the business being more in tune with their changing demands. At TestingXperts, we ensure that effective testing is implemented by the right set of testing specialists. Our intelligent test automation framework Tx-Automate ensures accelerated testing to provide you with higher productivity and the desirable time to market.

The post Achieving Agility and Scalability Becomes Reality with Microservices Architecture first appeared on TestingXperts.

In a world where everyone is running at a breakneck speed, the slow-motion era of conventional testing will just not hold ground, any more. Step into the power of Continuous Testing and be a sharp enterprise.

Contents 1. Continuous testing and Devops World 2. Enters Dev, Shakes Ops 3. Benefits of Continuous Testing and Devops 4. Shift to continuous testing

Continuous testing and Devops World

Before we knew it, the rise of an app-economy, fierce consumerization of technology, the arrival of digital natives and penetration of new technological marvels in everyday lives have strongly changed the way products and services are expected, consumed and forgotten. It’s a strange new-world where a company must be digitally-nimble and be there for a customer – every time and at any time.

Now in this app-stirred world, isn’t it fascinating that the rate of churn of new software is so fast today that to test it effectively in itself has become an onerous and slippery task? At the same time, can we ignore that in 2016, software failures have culminated into losses as huge as $1.1 trillion?

Let’s face it.

1. Always-on Users: Today’s customers are born into technology and there’s no weaning them away from the 24/7 and always-available services they have gotten used to. Enterprises and CTOs may find this problem a new beast altogether, since the digitally-born rivals are miles ahead in serving customers with jaw-dropping speed and an absolutely-robust grip on the pulse of the new-age customer.

2. Time to rethink the Status-Quo: There is no way that snail-paced, Luddite and bureaucracy-driven methods of building and testing apps can survive in this blistering world where apps come and go before you blink an eye.

How can you ensure that while your developers are trying to tune in to this new race, you also manage to have your QA and testing team ensure that the apps and offerings you put on your customer’s plate are not only dished out fast, but they also get a thumbs-up on quality and utility?

It’s a dilemma-dotted scenario where apps have to be continuously built, deployed, tested and released, but at the same time, IT can leave no room for any mistakes when it comes to defects, risks and usability issues.

Enters Dev, Shakes Ops

DevOps and the rise of Micro-services have prodded the Dev professionals into always being on their toes. However, the Ops side had to come and rub their shoulders too, without slugging behind.

That has engendered a very relevant and clever genre of testing, making businesses and testers re-imagine everything they took granted so far.

Benefits of Continuous Testing and Devops

1. It allows the software delivery pipeline to gather feedback that is immediate, continuous and actionable; and helps the business to be pre-emptive with risks around a software release.

2. One can sync in QA testing with Dev and Ops processes in an optimized, proactive and seamless way and hence put a tick-box on both business and development goals.

3. Now Dev sprints can find Ops and QA folks running side by side and both can ensure adequate quality, proper and effective coverage for frequent builds of the modern-day app-economies.

4. Since the onset of Agile development methodology and the app-economy era that came close on its heels, enterprises have been struggling to make sure QA is not miles behind the nimble and super-fast Dev processes that are almost status-quo now. With Continuous Testing, one can pull in a systematic approach, sturdy process improvement, and integration of QA into skate-board-strapped Dev and Ops processes; but, also be relaxed regarding the continuity that is fundamental and critical for faster development cycles.

5. Think of a new paradigm of automated tests. More organizations can now be seen embracing automated acceptance tests too. During the commit stage, these tests are being deployed and the range spans from functional to non-functional criteria while guarding against regression and ensuring overall business value as expected by the customer. These tests may spot errors that may be beyond the grip of unit and component tests as well. Interestingly, these acceptance tests are customer-facing unlike unit tests that are usually developer-facing. That’s a quantum leap for enterprises today that are fighting the relentless challenge of being relevant for digitally-savvy and always-on customers.

6. The context of a production-like environment is another highlight of these kinds of tests. Smart use of a risk-based testing approach will be a major accelerator for many enterprises here. With such tools and an evolved state of automation, enterprises can be assured of continuity in testing, and at the same time, confident about precise risk-assessment and mitigation insights that pour in at the right time to the right person.

7. Core automation is passé but in a continuous testing, adequate risk-based impact analysis comes to the forefront. Nowadays experts in the field are also offering a layered approach that entails test implementation layer and application driver layer. This helps the code to cover interaction with application to perform actions and test results. So much so that any small change in an application’s source code, configuration, environment or data can spur a new instance in the pipeline altogether.

Let’s remind ourselves that in this agile-app, fast-economy and tech-fuelled world, the age of monolithic and flabby software testing is over. Now is the time for the lean and the mean to jump in. Innovation and agility are no more longer in SDLC today, and conventional software testing cannot furnish the visibility, responsiveness, scope and endurance that the new age demands.

A shift to Continuous Testing is a no-brainer if you want to keep your customers happy with services run from robust, dependable, maintainable and automated suites as integral and easy parts of the lifecycle.

The certainty of providing the best user experience – one high on comfort and still free of defects needs a mindset switch – Test early, test faster, test often and test continuously.

The post Continuous Testing: Because DevOps and Impatient Customers matter first appeared on TestingXperts.

In a quest to achieve quicker delivery of software, organizations are increasingly adopting the Agile development model. However, to maximize the benefits of Agile software development, testing should be executed simultaneously with development. For this reason, organizations have been adopting DevOps for the last couple of years. The adoption of DevOps has helped teams to collaborate more, and implement practices such as ‘Shift-Left’ and ‘Shift Right’ testing. These practices are helping enterprises in building quality right from the beginning of the project. In this blog, we will discuss the importance of ‘shift left’ and ‘shift right’ testing approaches to ensure quality and agility.

Contents 1. Shift Left Testing Approach 2. Why shift-left? 3. What are the types of the Shift-Left Testing model? 4. Shift Right Testing Approach 5. What are the different methods of shift-right approach? 6. Why shift-right? 7. Conclusion

Shift Left Testing Approach

As the name suggests, the shift left testing approach starts to focus on testing as early as the requirements phase. Generally, the software testing process originates with static review of requirements specifications with a focus to identify and remove ambiguities in requirements and enhance the quality of requirements consumed down-stream. Shift left testing helps in identifying any defects early in the lifecycle.

The shift-left testing approach introduces testers at the primary stage of development to help them understand what requirements are being scoped and what the testability of those requirements is.  Shift left testing also helps testing teams to identify high-level test scenarios and start work on the detailed test cases.

Why shift-left?

– Time and resources are saved: Shift left approach helps in finding defects earlier in the software development lifecycle, allowing resources to invest less time in finding defects, thereby increasing quality and improving efficiency.

– Defects are found and fixed early: It’s very cost-effective to start identifying defects in requirements/user stories as it helps the testers to understand the testability of each requirement.

– Faster product delivery: Shift-left testing streamlines the development process, thereby ensuring faster delivery.

– Enhanced design: Through shift-left testing, bottlenecks, roadblocks, and possible performance failures are detected early on in the lifecycle, leading to a better design.

– Improved timelines and better ROI: With the shift-left testing there is less rework, projects work according to their regular timelines and the quality is always at the top. This ensures in delivering faster to the market with improved ROI.

Thus, the shift-left testing approach is an easy and economical way of reducing the time, efforts, and cost in improving the software at a complex state.

What are the types of the Shift-Left Testing model?

– Traditional shift left testing: In this testing approach, the focus is exclusively on the unit and integration testing by using API testing and modern test tools. This approach even has a drawback as it fails to focus on system-level and acceptance testing.

– Incremental shift left testing: In this testing approach, complex developments are broken down into smaller pieces to simplify the process. This practice of allowing the smaller segments to be tested one after the other helps the segments to be built upon each other. The incremental shift-left approach is widely adopted and used in the projects that have been having high complexity in the hardware.

– Agile/DevOps: This method helps in performing testing in numerous sprints and it is widely applied for developmental testing without operational testing. The Agile/DevOps Shift Left testing has gained popularity and it is preferred widely by many enterprises.

– Model-based shift left testing: This is the latest trend in shift left testing with a concept to find bugs at the earliest. Generally, shift-left testing is practiced at the early stage of a development cycle. But, in this method, the testing approach is during the design and development phase. This includes executable requirements, architecture and design models and helps in eliminating 45-65 percent of errors introduced in these early phases.

Shift Right Testing Approach

As we all know that shift-left is critical to software quality assurance and is an essential step in ensuring quality from the start, this approach alone is not enough to maintain performance and user experience. This has resulted in organizations adopting a ‘Shift-Right’ approach. The shift right testing approach initiates the testing task from the right that means the post-production of the software. In this approach performance and usability of an application are continuously monitored and feedback is sought continuously from users to understand the user behavior.

This approach helps in launching new features in the application fast and test by simulating its behavior in production.  This is achieved by gathering continuous feedback from the users through both formal and informal communication channels.

What are the different methods of shift-right approach?

A/B Testing:

This type of testing is commonly referred to as split testing or bucket testing. In this method, various new designs of a webpage are tested against the original designs of a page. The goal of this testing type is to determine which design generates more conversions. A/B testing is a part of the Conversion Rate Optimization process where the page with variation is compared with the ones of the original page. The page that helps in achieving better conversion is considered as the winner in the challenge.

Continuous Quality Monitoring (CQM):

This approach helps in improving the system quality during any software life cycle stage. A wide range of different tools and techniques are used to monitor the quality of the application. Code instrumentation, real user monitoring, and virtual user monitoring are a few CQM techniques that are used in the software during its production phase.

Chaos Testing:

In this method of testing, errors are introduced to the system to check its functionality and recovery in error conditions. By understanding how the system responds in stress conditions, it becomes easier for a team to identify and fix the bugs. The principle of chaos testing is to verify how the system responses when sudden attacks are introduced in the infrastructure, or the application or the network. The results achieved with this practice helps in improving the overall application standard.

Why shift-right?

– Quick feedback: Shift-right approach, allows the teams to gather user feedback and incorporate them in quick succession.

– Maximum test coverage: Shift right approach to testing provides testers the freedom of testing more and testing timely. This helps in eliminating more defects at the preliminary stage and provide a better quality application.

– More automation: Automation saves time and effort. Automating large parts of the process, when features and patches are being built into the application, helps in saving time and eventually helps in providing quality at speed.

Thus, adopting a Shift right testing approach offers improved customer experience and enhanced test coverage.

Conclusion

Considering the above-stated details, both shift-left and shift-right testing approaches are equally important and help in delivering a unique and different way of testing the software application. At TestingXperts, we follow both ‘Shift-Left’ and ‘Shift-Right’ software testing approach that adequately touches each and every aspect of the application to ensure best possible quality. Connect with us and allow us to make your software ready for business quickly.

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