Content 1. When should Regression Testing be taken up? 2. What are the Various Types of Regression Testing? 3. Significance of Regression Testing in Agile 4. Benefits with Regression Testing taken up in Agile Environments 5. Regression Testing challenges faced by agile team 6. Best Practices to follow for Regression Testing in Agile 7. Conclusion

When should Regression Testing be taken up?

Regression testing should be taken up on a new build when there has been a significant change in the original functionality even with a single bug fix. It is usually performed after verification of changes or when new functionality is added and should be repeatedly tested with every new function. In most conditions, it can be considered as a retest of tests and this testing method should be taken up in various situations such as

– When product enhancements are done

– When new patches added

– When small changes in the software configuration are made

– When code is modified due to an added new feature

– When changes are made to existing functionality or any patch fix

– When new integration takes place with other products

– When code changes are made for a performance upgrade

Specifically, all these above instances should be regression tested to ensure all functionalities remain unaffected even with new changes.

Under agile and DevOps practices, regression testing plays a critical role as continuous testing is the key to these methodology’s success to maintain product stability. Testers continue to follow shift-left testing to ensure effective testing to be done along with development.

Moreover, teams use regression testing to ensure the tested functionality continues to remain the same even when new functionality features are all developed within sprints.

Now, let us now try to know about various types of regression testing such as unit, partial, complete, and build-level regression testing types which have been detailed below.

What are the Various Types of Regression Testing?

Unit regression testing:

This is an important type of regression testing that should be taken up during the initial unit testing phase which tests the code as a single unit. This form of regression testing has a narrow approach and is focused on individual units of code.

Partial regression testing:

This form of regression testing is performed to check problems when making slight changes to the code. This testing process ensures to make the system work properly even after adding new code or when even slight code changes are made.

Complete regression testing:

It is a comprehensive regression testing method that involves testing the changed units as well as any old features of the application. It is commonly taken up to test when more than one code change has been done. This testing has to be performed before any major release or product delivery to ensure all functionalities continue to work seamlessly.

Build-level regression testing:

This method of regression testing at build-level corresponds to testing during the second build of upcoming release and is usually taken up when some code changes are done across the builds.

Significance of Regression Testing in Agile

Agile methodology revolves around fast and iterative processes with sprint cycles which are short and churn out features for each cycle. Specifically, the testing cycles should also be short to keep up proper balance between the sprint development and the iterative testing cycles that follow them.

Basically, the agile development is fast and dynamic and developers churn features in quick times. It is necessary that the testing cycles should also go hand-in-hand to deploy the new features after testing them.

In a true sense, development is done on one feature and essentially the testing has to be done on all new and old features that were developed earlier. It is a priority and necessity that with every new build, the regression testing has to be taken up to make sure that the new addition or improvement in the code does not compromise the functionality of existing features.

Thus, the regression testing has its own significance and this testing process ensures functionalities remain unaffected for every build. This regression testing process is critical for product’s success as it ensures all functionalities work in accordance with the given requirements in an agile environment.

Benefits with Regression Testing taken up in Agile Environments

– Helps to build a stable product as testing is taken up in sprints in agile environment to check whether the newly developed or existing functionalities are working as per the requirements

– Identifies any functionality issues early in the product development life cycle and ensures quicker resolution of these defects

– Automating regression testing in agile processes helps to reduce re-work and frees up the testers to be used for other important testing activities

– Effective regression testing embedded in agile practice helps to improve the overall quality of the product along with ensuring great user experience

Moreover, in agile scenarios with iterative changes, there are more frequent build cycles and continuous changes are added to the application. Therefore, in order to test these frequent changes, software regression testing should be taken up in agile practices.

Thus, for successful regression testing in agile, the QA teams should follow best regression testing practices and build effective regression testing suite from the onset of software product development to ensure all functionalities work effectively.

Regression Testing challenges faced by agile team

1. Too many changes:

During the software development process, there will be instances where the management and customers will ask for changes in line with requirements. These changes can prove to be unstable, due to which the efficiency of the test automation strategy can be dampened.

2. Time-consuming:

Testing large applications consumes a lot of time. To create and maintain a regression test suite requires a lot of time too.

3. Unable to manage regression tests:

With each sprint, the scale of regression tests increases. In the case of large projects, it is really difficult to manage regression tests. In order to manage regression tests properly, testing teams should automate and review tests on a continual basis. Ineffective tests must also be removed in the process.

4. Poor communication:

There should be an effective communication channel and proper strategic communication taking place between the testing team, developers, business analysts and business stakeholders. This will ensure that the regression testing process is streamlined. Through effective communication, specific features that have to undergo regression testing can be correctly ascertained.

5. Maintenance is a time-consuming process:

It takes quite a bit of time to maintain and update the regression testing suite. Time is consumed when new test cases are included or the existing ones are updated.

Best Practices to follow for Regression Testing in Agile

1. Define effective regression test strategy:

It is of utmost importance in an agile process to define an efficient test strategy for regression testing<.

In order to get effective regression test strategy, it should include

– Gathering all test cases

– Identifying the improvements that can be made for the test cases

– Estimating the time required for execution of these test cases

– Outlining of which of them can be automated and which ones to be manually tested

This sort of elaborate development of regression test strategy ensures effective testing results.

2. Conduct smoke and sanity tests:

It is necessary to conduct smoke and sanity tests before regression testing is actually conducted, as it saves time for testing teams. Sanity tests ensures a run-through of the basic functionality of an application and smoke tests are used to test the start or initial workflows such as login and startup pages. These two initial tests can be used to primarily categorize if the application is too flawed or working fine, and then the actual process of regression testing can be taken up.

3. Leverage test automation:

As every release cycle needs to include regression testing to ensure new developments do not break any other existing functions, it is ideal to adopt test automation to save time and efforts of testers. Effectively, if a parallel run of automated regression testing is performed, then the process can enormously save time and improve the software quality.

Automated regression testing makes the testing process much more efficient as running the same tests over an over again by manual testers is tedious. Automation can free up resources and this automation process can be used to reduce tedious and repetitive tasks.

4. Maintain and update regression packs regularly:

Essentially, a regression pack is a collection of test cases that are executed with new software update for every feature. This regression pack consists of test cases that have been written and drafted using the requirement specifications document. It is necessary to update these test cases with changes in features or with inclusion of new changes and it is also essential to maintain these test cases to ensure effective test results.

5. Adopt complete regression testing:

A comprehensive regression testing is essential and should be carried out and it should cover all the critical conditions. This sort of final regression testing should be taken up to certify that the functionality has not been altered and affected due to new code changes. This testing proves gives a green signal by the testers to move the code to production.

6. Perform continuous testing:

In Agile methodology, continuous testing is the backbone to ensure quality software. The process states to ‘Fail fast’ and ‘fail often’ through continuous testing, such that defects are fixed fast by the developers. These defects are fixed before delivery with minimum impact on software. Moreover, continuous integration and continuous delivery in agile & DevOps practices requires continuous testing with automated regression testing.

Hence, even for any developed software that requires some changes or modifications with passage of time and need, the updates are rolled out in a way that it is essential for the QA team to make sure that all the features are working flawlessly. In order to achieve this functionality stability for every feature, regression testing needs to be adopted.

Conclusion

Today’s businesses need quality software that is bound to deliver great customer experience and at the same time they need shorter release cycles. Therefore, it is necessary to ensure high-quality products that effectively meet the customer expectations which is achieved by leveraging software testing right from the stage of product development. Adopting effective regression testing in agile and DevOps practices ensures to deliver quality products to the market on time as all features are tested end-to-end to ensure quality product.

TestingXperts expertise with respect to Regression testing revolves around a spectrum of regression testing services that includes:

– Software Regression Testing

– System Integration Regression Testing

– Functional Regression Testing

– Automated Regression Testing

– End-to-End Regression Testing

Our cost-effective regression testing model helps QA teams to deliver a reasonable balance between test selection and fault detection. Leverage our next-gen regression testing services to ensure quality products as regression test automation by our test automation experts ensures to save time, effort and also ensures significant cost reduction. Talk to our experts today

The post What is the Significance of Regression Testing in the Agile? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Technology has pushed boundaries that are still unbeknown to many across the globe. Automation, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Virtual Reality (VR), and more are proof that the technologies are emerging at lightning speed and precision. For example, with Test Automation, the aim of eliminating errors and saving time has been successful. Plus, the good news is the Test Automation is not the monopoly of big companies. It has become the cornerstone of most software development and testing organizations.

Contents 1. Automation Testing 2. Ways to Setup and Maintain Ideal Automation Suites 3. Clear Test Data Management Approach 4. Impact analysis of any new enhancement in the application 5. Automate at API level/ lesser UI automation Conclusion

Software development and testing teams increasingly relying on automated checks to ensure their software conforms to a quality level that meets business and customer expectations. This is exactly why many companies have begun to embrace automated technologies. As per a report by Transparency Market Research, the global test automation market will likely to expand at a robust CAGR of 15.4% from 2017 to 2025 to become worth US$ 109.69 bn by 2025 from US$ 30.45 bn in 2016.

Automation is reducing the impending software issues and is deemed critical to the success of many software development teams that uses it. However, a common misconception is considering automation as a silver bullet for achieving instant quality. Teams start expecting 100% coverage, no maintenance, and supreme quality delivered overnight from their automation suites. Often there are many clear cases of executing Test Automation only to improve testing speed and quality.

The fact is automated test suites might not make your testing easier, sometimes, it can increase the maintenance burden of your suites. Maintaining a Test Automation suite without ambiguous targets leads to high cost, incompetence to acclimate to change, and failure to recognize the expected ROI.

Ways to Setup and how to maintain automation scripts

1. Clear Test Data Management Approach

One of the biggest challenges test engineers face is handling the test data in automated tests, especially in end-to-end test automation. Frequent changes in the data can make scripts fail. Every time a change is made to the application, it is important to refresh the database, change its status and run the scripts to avoid script failure. With this elementary approach, the refresh data source works with a few test suites, applications, and environments. Another way to avoid this situation is to build a new set of data every time you run the scripts. A clear test data management approach can help in maintaining the test automation suite and contribute to bring a clear ROI.

2. Regular health check of automation suites

Even minor changes can impact an automation suite if the test engineer is not aware of those changes. To avoid any challenges while the tests are running, get regular health checks of the automation suites. Regular checks will ensure automation suites perform as anticipated and give the best results.

3. Impact analysis of any new enhancement in the application

Impact analysis is a significant aspect of responsible Requirements Management. It provides an accurate understanding about the implications of a proposed change in an application, and how it may affect the application. This helps the teams make informed business decisions about the relevant changes to approve. The analysis inspects the proposed change to recognize modules to be created, modified, or rejected and to estimate the effort associated to implement the change. Missing on an impact analysis will not change the size of the task, but it is advised to avoid turning scope into a surprise. Based on the analysis, QA should be planned to update the impacted automated scripts during the sprints itself.

4. Automate at API level/ lesser UI automation

UI tests remain the most common type of automation that the test engineers perform. Most agile teams prefer UI-level automation. However, within a few months they start the automation, the teams often realize the cost of maintaining UI-level tests is comparatively greater than the benefit from the automation. So, test engineers are advised to automate their application at the API level because performing automation at application code not just saves on TCO but also increases the durability of scripts.

Conclusion

To enable your testing efforts, automation of the test suites will be the best solution. However, maintaining this Automation Suite can be a challenge. It is vital to define goals for Test Automation first. Whether you need to accelerate testing to improve time to market, or to test more within the existing time frame, a good Test Automation design can help you achieve goals and intended ROI for automation.

TestingXperts (automated testing company) with its well-thought-out strategies have evolved its practices and have surfaced as the leaders in creating and maintaining best automation suites for its clients. Connect with us to know more about our Test Automation capabilities and how we can help you transform your business with our testing strategies.

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Digitalization is transforming the business landscape to a great extent. Optimal utilization of resources has become crucial for every enterprise these days, necessitating the need for Automation Testing. Automation Testing is an essential subset of software testing. It can accelerate the process of software validation and increase testing coverage.

Contents 1. Challenges of Automation testing 2. The Need for Cloud-Based Automation 3. Benefits of Cloud-Based Automation 4. Conclusion

Here we stumble across an important question. What is it that makes automation so important yet challenging for organizations? Here are some major challenges.

1. High Upfront Investment Cost: Automation testing, no doubt, is crucial and useful in most agile environments. Though, when looking at the cost, there are many concerns. The early phase of test automation is generally expensive.

2. Distributed Automated Testing: Managing and distributing the workload becomes imperative for every project. Executing several automated scripts in a shorter window requires a lot of resources and machines for parallel execution. Setting up the required number of machines with execution environment can hamper the overall schedule and RoI from automation. Hence, there is a crucial need for cloud-based automation systems.

3. Effective Communication and Collaboration in Team: As enterprises have different teams spread globally, communication and collaboration among teams become difficult. This is possibly a major challenge in test automation as it demands more communication and collaboration.

The Need for Cloud-Based Automation

With the expansion of cloud technology and businesses inclined towards increased acceptance of workflows, cloud-based test automation has gained high power among QA and software testing specialists and has led to a momentous revolution in the software development lifecycle.

The adoption of cloud-based automation comes with several benefits such as time and cost-effectiveness, real-time collaboration, test environment compatibility, easy access to resources, environments & platforms support, and a faster time to market. These are the elaborated benefits of Cloud-based automation testing.

1. Real-Time Collaboration Cloud-based automation testing helps QA Analysts to collaborate in real-time with each other as they have a higher availability of tools and test suites. Similarly, cloud-based automation testing tools provide extensive adaptability and effective partnership mostly for businesses with different teams spread globally.

2. Test Environment Compatibility There is zero setup time required to setup Cloud-based automation testing tools since everything is pre-designed and there is no need for any installations for the automation testing tools. The complete arrangement of testing tools is incorporated into one solution.

3. Time and Cost Effectiveness Cloud-based automated testing tools offer extensibility to bring on-board the resources exactly as per their needs, therefore the payment is made only for the resources utilized in the project. Since the infrastructure is simulated, it can be set up easily with some variations in the configuration.

4. Faster Time to Market Cloud-based automation testing reduces time-to-market to a great extent. Numerous benefits involved with cloud-based automation testing offer easy building of real-time reports, testing infrastructure, comprehensive collaboration, which helps in increasing the speed of development and testing process.

Conclusion

Automation results in improved resource utilization, workload management, and IT operations. This is the key reason for enterprises to choose cloud-based automation solutions at such a fast pace. An organization striving to achieve dynamic business operations should choose cloud-based automation testing as their prime resource.

Connect with TestingXperts, where our teams will help you adopt the ideal cloud-based automation testing solution aligned specifically to your business needs.

The post How Automation over the Cloud Can Drive Business Efficiency first appeared on TestingXperts.

Contents 1. Role of Quality Assurance 2. Domain Specialization and QA 3. Advantages of Domain Specialization in QA 4. Conclusion

Role of Quality Assurance

Quality Assurance practices over the past years have experienced many waves of innovation, be it test automation or methods to optimize testing. With changing times, the QA function as we knew it transformed and the focus shifted to:

– Meeting the essential compliance and regulatory standards

– Requirements coverage referring to code coverage

– Giving utmost importance to customer experience

Earlier, QA industry had a horizontal focus and was indifferent to business domains. However, it is turning out to be an industry where domain specialization is a must. Therefore, QA teams need to have profound knowledge of the business domain while testing an application. For QA teams to be considered as quality gatekeepers, their understanding of the domain must be up to the required standard.

Domain Specialization and QA

Domain knowledge can add an advantage to the testing project by helping testers to prioritize the features for test execution and exercise underlying business rules. Domain specialized experts can test an application in the most anticipated way, according to the end user perspective. Domain knowledge can help Quality Assurance teams achieve multiple benefits throughout the Software Development Lifecycle.

Advantages of Domain Specialization in QA

Here is the list of the advantages of having domain specialization:

1. Quick requirement analysis:

Having a domain specialization helps identify gaps in the requirements, ensures better coverage from business functionality perspective and enables early identification of defects through static testing.

2. Better user story development:

A QA with good domain knowledge can help the product owner by writing better user stories and defining better acceptance criteria.

3. Builds capability:

Domain knowledge helps a QA engineer to have a better view of the product. Without proper domain knowledge, defects in the underlying business rules can remain uncovered in the preliminary stage of testing, causing problems during the final or release stage.

4. Thorough understanding of technical terminology:

An engineer who completely understands the domain can detect issues early as compared to a novice in domain knowledge. A proper understanding of the technical terminology will help the tester to describe the problem and design edge case scenarios accurately.

5. Helps in prioritizing bug fixes:

With proper knowledge, the tester will have a clear idea of how to prioritize the bug fixes and can guide rest of the development team. While planning the bug fixes, the tester will not just save cost and time but will also enhance the overall product a quality in cost-effective manner.

6. Reduces training time:

Domain specialization can increase the overall productivity of the team and add better value to the final product.  Having prior knowledge of the domain will reduce the training time, resulting in quicker results. Proper knowledge of the flow of the business processes helps in achieving a better understanding of the product requirements.

7. Boosts the productivity of the team:

Domain specialists are in demand due to their ability to understand the application beyond finding bugs. Having domain knowledge can help in suggesting and implementing fixes in crucial times. This not only saves time, but also increases the productivity of the team.

Conclusion

Emphasizing on domain specialization in QA is bridging the gap between business users and the IT teams, thus increasing the relevance of the work product delivered to the end user. Domain specialization is creating a platform for innovation by evolving the QA practices.

TestingXperts’ domain-based testing team of QA professionals have extensive experience in the latest technologies across various business verticals such as Healthcare, Insurance, Manufacturing, logistics, Banking and Financial Services, etc. While being well versed in the latest testing trends, TestingXperts’ team come with great domain knowledge and skill sets. TestingXperts’ domain-based testing ensures delivery of the expected services and enables the higher customer satisfaction.

The post Achieve Next-Level of QA Innovations with Domain Specialization first appeared on TestingXperts.

Contents 1. Testing Point of sales(POS) Systems 2. Areas to Test in a Mobile POS System 3. Types of Testing Needed for POS(Point of Sale) 4. Conclusion

Testing Point of sales(POS) Systems

A point of sales (POS) system is at the hub of every retail business and is a large technology investment. An efficient POS software package increases productivity by reducing unnecessary work and managing the entire business. However, as technology is improvising day by day, POS systems are also evolving with technology.

As omnichannel initiatives are grabbing the attention, retailers are deploying shopping initiatives mobile POS, such as click-n-collect across mobile and other digital channels.

These are innovative ways to provide mobility and freedom to the customers and keep the cash register ticking. However, along with these demand creation opportunities with digital technologies, companies need to be wary of various application pitfalls like unpleasant customer experience, functional issues, payment fraud, security breaches, and server crashes, etc. This necessitates the need for continuous testing through quality assurance, performance management, and security.

Areas to Test in a Mobile POS System

Here are some focus areas that need focus in testing for a mobile POS system.

– Teller Activity: This includes transactions such as the entry of items, tender, Store Value Cards, discounts etc.

– Transactions: Return, exchange, regular sale, sale with credit/ debit/ gift card, loyalty member purchase, items, quantities, and prices.

– Store Server and Integration: Verification of POS interaction with store servers and back-office systems.

– Data of Loyalty Members: The system keeps track of what your customers are buying and who they are. It keeps track of what’s selling, at what times of day or week, to which types of customers and by which salespeople.

– Ability to Read all Cards: There are various types of cards in the industry today such as Magnetic Stripe, CAV, etc.

– Performance: Speed or the time taken to send a request (read) and receive a response and applying the transaction based rules like Rebates/Discounts/Tax etc.

– Negative Scenarios: Several transaction declined scenarios such as invalid card/PIN/expired Card etc.

Types of Testing Needed for POS(Point of Sale)

Here are some major types of software testing that must be implemented for effective omnichannel retailing initiatives:

1. Functional testing:

2. Mobile Testing:

3. Compatibility testing:

4. Load & Performance Testing:

5. Security testing:

6. Big Data/ Analytics Testing:

7. Test Automation:

Conclusion

In the age of digitally connected customers, superior customer experience is critical to the success of the retail industry. TestingXperts has wide industry experience and has been testing the Omnichannel initiatives of global clients from retail industry. Connect with us and identify how we can help you improve the performance and functionality of your mobile POS systems.

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Adoption of agile methodologies and best practices indicate that the organizations are constantly challenging themselves to get services and products to market faster. Automation testing is just one way to accelerate your project delivery and in doing so building up a regression pack of test scripts that can be run with minute effort in the shortest amount of time. The three greatest benefits brought together by test automation are reduction in time, usage of resources effectively and efficiently, and increasing the test coverage.

Automation Testing

Test automation significantly shortens the testing lifecycle and increases the speed of the testing process.  Automating your test scripts allows you to save a huge amount of time instead of just running them manually. Automated tests can be easily built once you have the primary tests in place, which means that the testers can add tests into the regression pack and build a greater test coverage quickly. This implies that every industry at this time or in future will need help on all aspects of Automation Testing. Let us understand how test automation as a service is bringing value to the organizations.

Role of Testers Redefined

The role of testers has been transformed with the arrival of the concept of Agile, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery. This concept has been evolved from the arduous Manual Testing process to fast and recurrent Test Automation. Automation has been highly responsible for the transforming and evolving role of a tester. In an Agile environment, when testers and developers have to collaborate, the overall culture of the teams change, testing gets quicker, and releases get more frequent. Automation cannot work without an effective testing strategy. The role of a tester will progress in an automated testing environment.

Clear focus on Quality of Testing

As quality is kept at the forefront these days, there is an increasing need for automation to ensure quality. This is a shared responsibility of the development team and the testing team. Automation can create a huge difference in redefining software development at every stage of the cycle. Furthermore, organizational strategies will be changed, and there will be evident structural changes to accommodate quality within their systems. Quicker delivery will be the main objective, but only automation can help in achieving speed with quality.

Quicker Feedback

Speed has become the prerequisite across various industries. Automation can, in all possible ways, help give instant and rapid feedback to the team, which also cuts down the delays and lays focus on improvement. Automation adds value by speeding up the arduous and tedious testing activity that is required for making sure that you achieve the desired result. In a certain way, automation in testing makes the activity more and more perceptible and assessable for considering the ensuing activities.

In Conclusion

Automation testing is the sure-shot method, bringing desired value to the organizations and helping them bring agility with quality. The need for automation testing cannot die in the future but only provide the desired outcome with well-aligned and dedicated teams that are able to work on projects and scripts.

TestingXperts is a automation testing company provides qa automation testing service with its extensive experience and an intelligent Test Automation Framework ‘Tx-Automate’. Connect with us to leverage our QA Automation Testing services.

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