Top 5 Reasons why Agile Testing Governance is Needed

Agile Testing and Development teams are powered by ideas that encourage collaboration, flexibility, transparency, and simplicity to ensure responsiveness and frequent feedback. This holds true throughout the software development or application development cycle. Nevertheless, Agile cannot function as a set of principles that operate independently once they are set into motion. It is a process that needs holistic environment management, and the reasons could be quite compelling to know. Why is it so business critical for you as an Agile-based organization to consider Agile Testing Governance?

According to Gartner Analysts, Thomas E. Murphy, Mike West, and Keith James Mann, enterprise agile planning tools enable organizations to make use of agile practices at scale to achieve enterprise-class agile development (EAD). This is done with practices that are business-outcome-driven, customer-centric, collaborative, and cooperative.

There is no doubt that Software Development is getting complex and agile approach enables transparency and better opportunities to track and check the test records. At the same time, it is important to keep this process going on for effective adherence to the core ideology. Enterprises are increasingly adopting Agile Testing methodologies to ensure that they are able to develop applications and software as per the market standards.

However, things get challenging with constant changes in the brief and the business requirements. Governance or holistic management of the Agile environment is needed to keep the teams intact despite any number of changes.

1. Ensure collaboration between co-located teams

Agile set-up needs a working code in a span of 2-3 weeks, which needs constant collaboration with cross functional teams. These teams could be located at different and distant locations, making the idea of collaboration almost impossible. Organizations are as well very much under pressure to keep up with the budget constraints and bring the teams up to speed to respond to challenges and various business needs.

Management of the Test environment is needed to ensure Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, Virtualization, and Automation. Hence, governance of the agile scenario helps to keep a check on the progress of various teams as designed and expected. Adherence with the agile protocols is important to make the approach work for teams irrespective of their location.

2. Keep track of the strategy

Agile approach is a by far a multi-dimensional methodology in the software delivery process. It needs constant validation, amendments, and operation under unstable environments. While this is happening, teams might get shuffled and roles might get interchanged. This makes it difficult for team leads and organizations to track the process.

Constant check is needed to keep the development and testing process on track and ensure that there is no hiccup in terms of delivering on client briefs. A governance model helps to keep a track on the people, processes, and the strategy at large. It is imperative that the end result is delivered as desired and briefed. There could be a challenge particularly where teams are just moving from a traditional model to an Agile set-up. Governance is needed for not only mapping the strategy, but also for keeping the team glued onto it.

3. Establishing a Unified Team model

Agile set-up for any testing or development activity needs an on-demand environment with the required configurations that could change. It is important to manage various components within this environment to make further iterations and also to track them. Hence, you need a unified Test Environment Management model that can enable smooth coordination between testing and all stakeholders.

It helps to create a single point of contact that can ensure adherence and monitoring of the processes as well as the environment. Agile Testing Governance is needed to undertake all essential activities such as Test Infrastructure Management, Test Data Management, deployment management, and anything that relates to the environment. It helps in creating a Unified Team model to take care of the environment assets, resources, and environment operations.

4. Ensure Continuous Automation for Continuous Delivery

Agile has been hailed for bringing in automation and speed to the delivery process. While it is critical to monitor the automation process, it is important to keep a track of the automated test frameworks and test cases. This can be a resourceful as well as an essential activity check on software delivery process. Agile testing involves shorter test cycles and quicker releases. Automation forms a critical element in the process.

Governance is needed to ensure that automation is implemented for quicker turnaround and ultimately serves the larger purpose. Likewise, it helps to bring more efficiency and ensure faster resolution of issues in the test environment, which could be anything – scheduling, provisioning, or automation.

5. Deriving Value from the process

The ultimate question ‘Are we getting value?’, which comes down to questioning the effectiveness of the approach. Agile Governance is essential to gauge the effectiveness of the investments made and the effort that went into deriving the scope, task completion, expenditure, and probability of gaining accuracy. Mature best practices are needed to deliver on the Agile Manifesto, but governance is needed to validate that all the efforts help to deliver the ultimate cause.

It further helps to build the short-term and long-term strategy for testing, basis the earlier outcomes. It can be a great way to review the Governance mechanism for the future as well. Cost optimization and Time Rationalization are key factors to measure within the governance process, which can even empower teams to shift paradigms within the testing sphere.

In Conclusion

Governance needs to be an enabler for Agile approach, which implies that it cannot delay the testing cycle. A process has to be defined for collecting the data in the testing cycle that doesn’t obstruct the ongoing activities. Agile Governance bridges the gap between Management and IT to foster creativity and innovation in software development.

Flexibility and speed are at the core of agile, and any governance activity implemented must boost it further. What’s your word on this topic?

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