7 Ways to Optimize Your Agile Testing Strategy

The World Quality Report 21/22 surveys showed that 44 percent of respondents thought that there is a lack of professional testing expertise in agile teams. And it's not a surprise at all. Agile testing boosts the software development velocity. However, in some cases, it leads to certain issues, including less focus on quality, poor resource planning, limited documentation, high expenses, etc.

But how can you improve the integration of testing in Agile development?

In this article, I'll highlight best practices for optimizing and improving your Agile testing strategy.

7 tips on how to optimize Agile testing process

In this section, I'll cover 7 widespread approaches that master the quality of the testing process without losing agility.

• Prepare and run tests as early as possible. With the test-driven approach to development, tests are written before new features appear. This provides testers with more time to create test scripts. Also, you don't have to modify or replicate test scripts whenever code changes are made.
• Focus more on what matters. An initial focus on product quality drives better team collaboration, helps you quickly implement new QA methods, and produce a top-tier product. To successfully implement a quality-focused culture, everyone involved in the process should understand and embrace the primary goal -- creating a quality product. The focus should be on customer experience and business objectives, as well as on efficiently and quickly meeting the requirements.
• Quit thinking about AI and start applying it. Artificial intelligence (AI) in testing has evolved from an upcoming phenomenon to the hottest thing in quality assurance today. Adoption of AI in testing helps simplify the software development lifecycle. For instance, it can be leveraged to automate and reduce the number of routine tasks in development and testing. However, while AI possesses the potential to significantly improve test automation, some of its features are still in their maturity stage.
• Maximize automation of tests. The WQR 2021-22 found that about 52% of companies don't have the necessary qualified and proficient resources to automate testing. But, to take your Agile testing to the next level, test automation should be your priority. However, keep in mind that automated tests cannot completely replace manual ones. They can save time and resources when working on large, repeated tasks or long-cycle complex projects. While manual testing takes more time, it allows you to test for UX and UI issues or the overall application performance. A wise balance of these two types of testing ensures the team will achieve high results.
• Automate CI/CD quality gates. Today, teams adopt CI/CD pipelines to create high-quality, well-tested software with high levels of velocity and stability. CI/CD principles also reduce risks and enhance reliability, especially in complex projects with frequently changing requirements. In addition, it significantly eliminates manual processes and errors.
• Adopt dashboards for end-to-end transparency. Applying dashboards is crucial when it comes to quality status reporting. In end-to-end development and operational cycles, they provide transparency and continuous feedback. Today it is not just a tool for management reporting but for a deep understanding of what quality was before testing, what it should be, what it looks like now, and so on. But unfortunately, statistics show that only 35% of respondents have implemented automated quality dashboards for continuous quality monitoring.

In a nutshell

Above, I’ve listed basic tips to keep in mind if you want to improve your Agile testing strategy. However, this list is not comprehensive. Depending on the specific case, each team or business needs to consider many factors to get the most out of an Agile testing strategy.