By Amit Dixit, Delivery Manager, LTI
The IT services landscape has witnessed dynamic transformation in the current unprecedented times. For now, comprehensive business continuity plans of enterprises are focused on ensuring employee safety and continuity of operations, globally. Majority of employee base, both onshore and offshore, is working from home and clients have appreciated the speed and agility with which organisations have adjusted to the new normal. Another interesting trend to note is that organisations are adopting themselves to Open API and public cloud more willingly now than ever before.
In light of the current situation, where remote functioning has taken centre-stage, the need for software testing has become even more critical. One of the most obvious question asked in such times is- ‘How can an IT organisation delivering projects, reduce testing to deliver the value faster and avoid risks too?’
Globally, testing stream is still embraced in a traditional way with dependencies on various requirements such as test environments and test data which is largely sequential in nature. One of the key requirements is to reduce the duration of the testing phase in order to give impetus to the project delivery.
Teams must adopt a swift and dynamic approach to testing and allocate responsibilities to various stakeholders other than just testers. The traditional model will not sustain for a very long time and would deliver value at an excruciatingly slow pace particularly in case of large programs. The advent of devops and cloud has already put a positive dent on testing stream thus forcing experts to think fresh.
Changing the testing phase drastically through just test automation is merely a good aspiration. There is a lot more to the big picture though and hence a wider view of testing across various phases should be considered. It is important to ask questions to action the appropriate change but it’s even more important to ask question at the relevant time in the delivery lifecycle. For example, asking the question during the testing phase itself would only result in analysing the business impact of releasing defects in production. Instead, it will be ideal to think collaboratively about it’s upfront results in actionable approach with shared responsibility plan comprising various stakeholders from development, operations, business teams and project managers. Unfortunately, the latter is an approach that is still far from reality, in most nations.
Five key steps
Here are 5 key steps that should be considered by IT organisations that wish approach testing creatively:-
#1 Educate project teams on the approach of testing to encompass failure readiness. Erstwhile testing objective has been to avoid failures in production, but the new world testing stream is better placed to accept failure and recover quickly. This factor has major implications on reducing the sequential testing phase.
#2 Ensure thorough monitoring and analysis of failure bumps. Treat this as the biggest priority for testers as it will be a huge help in troubleshooting. Up-skilling testers is a must to achieve this step.
#3 Dev ops and test work will increasingly move into cloud and won’t be restricted to a production setup. Hence, cloud teams and testing should participate jointly on deployment phase beforehand as that paves the way for the approach of testing.
#4 Application development teams should look to increase delivery of unit testing and implement TDD approach almost every time. Test leads should support ADM organizations to implement this unit testing model. This collaboration is a must now and cannot be delayed between Dev and test teams.
#5 The unit testing automation should be reused with each deployment. It’s almost impossible to establish new UI based automation for each deployment assuming that the frequency will be high. The regression pack and progression pack for unit testing should be maintained.
To conclude, I believe the greatest mistake that organizations should avoid is thinking that streamlining the testing mechanism is secondary. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. No matter how much you leverage exponential technologies, it’s essential that you regard testing as an equally critical component of a much broader transformation that touches process, people, and technologies.
