SOFTWARE TESTING is no piece of cake in today's software world. Gone are days when testing was all about manual testing with few test scripts. Industry has been changing a bit too quick with an inevitable challenge of having very less time for testing world to react to the major changes. The three things that have changed the game of testing and have increased the testing scope by three fold compared to what we had before are "Agile", "Cloud" and "Mobile". Now, not really sure what else is in store. I would like to term a combination of these game changing concepts together as "Testers Perfect Storm" in the article and bring out what are the key challenges due to this perfect storm. Lets also follow this article up with what kind of solutions can we think of to ride this "Perfect Storm" in immediate future.
Challenge 1: Agile
| Challenges | Questions |
| Open To Change: The very feature of agile dictates changes even late in development. Cascading these changes to testing level poses multiple challenges due to short time available for testers to react, increased churn of code meaning extra regression required. |
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| Short Iterations: While sequential model has provided enough time to define test strategy and spec, short iterations gives a never ending challenge on testers time for test planning. |
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| Specifications: Agile manifests less documentation and literally story cards available as requirements. |
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| Increased Meetings: Having so many meetings and face to face discussions shouldn't result in analysis paralysis. Poker, Sprint, StandUps, Retrospectives, Release and if its large scale implementation testing teams themselves will have atleast 2 to 3 other meetings. |
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| Timelines & Commitmemnts: In the name of value delivery are teams practically taking more than we can chew resulting in squeezing timelines for testing. Traditionally testing has been the area of compromise should timelines squeez. |
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Challenge 2: Cloud
| Challenges | Questions |
| Learning Curve: Introduction of cloud has increased scope of testing enoromously and has led to a huge learning curve to teams in terms of understanding cloud itself and cloud types along with risks it poses. Infrastructure, Security, Multi-Tenancy, New Tools, 3rd Parties, in depth understanding of how to handle Performance and like are now mandatory and cannot be classified into "Regression" based tests. |
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| Security: Security becomes the biggest entity in testing on cloud owing to the fact the entire application suite including databases in many cases will be sitting outside the organization infrastructure. This pushes some of the teams into altogether a new arena of testing. |
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| Data Consistency: Replication of data across distributed databases to give consistent infromation from different datacentres. Integration with ThirdParty software poses challenges of connectivity and synchronisation of data between various components. |
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| Performance: I guess we are not strangers here to assess how crucial performance becomes once you host applications on cloud. If performance testing an application on physical servers was hard enough, what about testing on virtual servers? |
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| MultiTenancy and Availability: In scenario of multiple tenants performance issues of one client could effect other clients. We are at the mercy of cloud hosting providers on much of mulit tenancy and availability testing that needs to be done. This gets complicated when we include distributed data centers. Who approves such tests? |
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Challenge 3: Mobile
| Challenges | Questions |
| Multiple Platforms: Advent of Mobile and Tablets have increased testing scope four fold. Take an example of an ecommerce site. Good old days we had just a website, in todays world this single site has to be tested across web, atleast 3 to 4 mobile platforms and similar number of tablets. While it is apparent there may be different teams do we want to really engage different teams for different platforms? |
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| Usability: Usability poses a great deal of challenges to ensure proper requirements are gathered for easy navigation and economical data transfer across funcitonalities. The success of such apps depends solely on user experience and is a great challenge for testers to become extremely innovative to assure a perfect UI. |
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| Testing Cost: If you were playing around with browser for your testing so far then get ready to have atleast one device per platform including mobiles and platforms to test appliations on mobile space. This also mandates testing across multiple OS's. |
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| Timelines: If you are working in a 2 week iterations, imagine a case the development of a features takes 2 days while testing will take atleast 4 to 5 days to test across different platforms. |
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Combine all the 3 challenges together with changing requirements as in AGILE, steep learning curve for CLOUD, and many different platforms and devices for testing across MOBILE devices which most companies are into right now or will be in very near future, testing teams are up for a PERFECT STORM and have to plan to ride this storm.
In my next article in the near future I will attempt about how a SOFTWARE TESTER could SURF the storm. It will be helpful if people can comment their own experiences or suggest solutions for our TESTERS to surf the storm. Should you wish to follow the series please do subscribe to our feeds below.
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