Common Challenges QA Teams Face in Agile Testing and Tips to Overcome Them!
By: Nitesh Gupta
Tags: Testing, Agile Development, Quality Assurance, Software Development

In today’s dynamic market environment, agile methodology has become essential to deliver a quality software amidst of frequent releases of new functionalities. Pushing the traditional waterfall approach behind, agile methodology emphasizes on active collaboration of clients, testers and developers on the evolving requirements. However, as the agile methodology eclipses traditional development approaches, it has stirred up some challenges for testing organizations too. Here are some of the challenges that agile testers face and ways to overcome those challenges.

#Frequently Changing Requirements:

Agile methodology follows an iterative model and changing requirements from the client’s end mid-sprint is common. However, these unexpected changes may be complex for developers and testers who have already started working on the next iteration. Sometimes, these evolving requirements lead them to begin from the scratch making it hard to complete the project within the deadlines.

How to Overcome

In such a scenario, testers need to think on the customers’ perspective and consider all the possible risks and updates. Perform risk analysis, test all the highest priority functionalities and identify the test cases more prone to bugs. Documenting every little detail about the tests that have been run can help project team to make informed decision.

#Incomplete Information on the Story

There is times when client doesn’t have all the details to define the behavior of the feature. Development team can develop a prototype to get more idea of the functionality. However, it becomes challenging for the testers to test the functionality without a proper understanding of the feature.

How to Overcome

Understanding the concept of the story, testing team can start with the advanced scenarios. Even if there are changes in the details, these high-level scenarios can maintain the context. And based upon these results, they can get an overview of the functionality and can communicate with the client further.

#Lack of Communication

Effective communication is most important component of agile development. Environment where all teams working simultaneously, any communication gap can affect the overall development. For example- development team updated a piece of code for specific functionality and didn’t communicate it to QA. Thus, client may end up receiving a product having unresolved bugs.

How to Overcome

Scrum meetings can play a vital role in bridging the communication gaps between different teams. Emails keeping all in the loop also helps in getting everyone on the same page. In addition, this gives better understanding of the product and the process.

#Lack of Technical Skills

When it comes to agile testing, QA team must be competent to help developers with integration testing, automation checks, etc. Testers not expert in automation can take too much time to execute the repetitive test cases and testers not sounding good in manual testing can miss some important scenarios therefore it is necessary to think out-of-the-box and test all possible and critical test coverages.

How to Overcome

Testers are required to keep themselves updated with the latest technology and scripting languages. Understanding the concept and then designing the test scenarios adhering to the criteria is the base for bug-free software. Using automation tools can help QA teams in web-based projects.

Summarizing It Up:

Agile methodology is lauded for high quality software delivery and flexibility in adapting new requirements. Therefore, maintaining a high-level grasp of project’s goal with the ability to manage client expectations is vital for sustainable software measure. Above article describes some challenges that testers face in agile testing and ways to overcome those challenges.