Testing in Agile Environments
Organizations adopt Agile for faster, better development. But regulated organizations are hesitant.
That's because there are five common barriers to Agile adoption.
In this blog, we'll cover testing in Agile environments — and how to do it.
Agile Development Lacks Testing
Agile is often perceived to be great for developers, but with a big gap — testing. Many regulated organizations struggle with the mindset:
“Agile does not allow you to do the formal testing necessary to ensure that the product does what it’s supposed to do.”
So, some organizations transitioning to Agile struggle to understand where traditional testing teams fit into the new process.
Agile teams often focus on user stories and tasks, keeping testing as a separate activity outside of the sprint or iteration. In a functional safety environment, however, that separation doesn’t work.
Testing and development need to remain integrated and traceable, so you know that what was developed was tested, and that all defects were addressed.
Back to topLearn Complete Agile Testing Methodology — 5 Examples for the Agile Tester
How to Do Testing in Agile Environments
Helix ALM (formerly TestTrack) helps you to manage this disconnect by allowing everyone to work in the same system, with user stories, tasks, and test cases all given the same importance.
With Helix ALM, the testing team can easily view and filter in a sprint to only see the testing activities (test cases and runs) they need to focus on.
The project can still be tracked as a whole, with burn down or burn up reports available for all activities or just testing activities, depending on what you need to know at the time.
The team can also use Helix ALM’s task boards as Kanban or Scrum boards to track testing activities.
Taking it a step further, Helix ALM helps establish a more integrated development process and stronger traceability, because you can create a test from a user story or task and they are automatically linked.
With traceability across the user stories, your teams won’t have to use separate tools for their testing activities and their Scrum or Kanban activities.
Back to top4 More Barriers to Agile Adoption
There are four other common barriers to Agile adoption in regulated environments. Learn how to overcome them:
Back to topTransition to Agile Successfully
Transitioning to Agile can be tricky for any organization. And it's trickier for organizations in highly-regulated industries.
Until now.