Moving Towards Agile Testing Strategies

Abstract

Testing is a vital activity for delivering a high quality software product to the customers. Often testing accounts for more project effort and time than any other software development activities. Traditional software development process models are being used for long time in software development. Recently, the software development in the industry is moving towards agile due to the advantages provided by the agile development process. One of the main advantages of agile software development process is delivering the high quality software to the customers in shorter intervals. Another important advantage is, the agile process models embrace the changes in requirements at any stage of software development. Due to these advantages, software industry is showing interest in software development using agile process models. One of the agile process models which is being used in the software industry is, the "scrum". Since testing plays a major role in the success of the product, it is given a lot of importance in software development. Testing strategies for conventional process models are well established, but these strategies are not directly applicable to agile testing without modifications and changes. One of the important current research areas is the agile software testing strategies. The main objective for any agile testing strategy is to reduce the testing time and at the same time ensuring the software quality. In this paper, a strategy for agile testing in the scrum software development environment is proposed and presented. The sprint activities which form the context for the proposed testing strategy are also proposed. The tools which are helpful for automation which is part of the strategy are presented. The advantages of the proposed strategy are highlighted. Case study which used the proposed strategy is presented, it indicated that the number of bugs reported by customer reduced significantly in scrum agile development using the proposed testing strategy.