Agile Testing Is Really Helpful For Enterprises To Stay Innovative & Competent

Google has recently published its annual list of top applications of the year, which are not necessarily the most downloaded ones, but are also some of the most popular ones. Why do some applications click so well and some just go unnoticed. There could be many factors responsible for it, such as, utility, usability, customer interface, network compatibility, device compatibility, and much more.

Digital Transformation poses its own challenges and makes it more and more difficult for enterprises to understand what works and what doesn’t. In such scenarios Agile Testing methodologies come in handy and enable teams to try and test smaller fragments.

It is a universal fact that Agile methodologies help teams to deliver better and with more conviction. It gives time for development and testing teams to try and even roll back the updates in case of any undesirable outcome. The team gets broken down into smaller groups that include both testers and developers who work on a specific update and roll it out to get the required feedback/results. In this way, organizations ensure that their business-critical applications are in line with their business objectives.

More than its convenience and the cost-effectiveness it ensures, Agile methodologies help provide the flexibility to innovate and try new things. At the same time, they give an edge to testing it even in a LIVE set-up. If you are planning to take the Agile route, these are some great strengths that Agile testing brings to the table that help enterprises to stay innovative and competent in the consumer space.

Specifically in the light of Digital Transformation, the overall application development process has revolutionized. There is a growing need to connect with the consumer and ensure an enabling experience. At the same time, businesses need to address related issues such as future-proofing the organization, changing internal factors, dealing with competition, and cope up with new and emerging technologies.

An Agile approach helps to roll out new initiatives and deliver frequently for organizations to survive in a rapidly evolving digital scenario. It has definitely made a difference and has impacted the overall enterprise application development process.

Let us see how agile testing is really helpful for enterprises to stay innovative & competent.

• Flexibility to propose and change

Probably one of the greatest and most obvious contributions of Agile to the development process is its flexibility factor. This empowers teams to go back and forth and make changes on a constant basis. It helps to accept the changes and respond to the changes effectively. For instance, during the development process if the team feels that a different solution might provide better outcome for a challenge, then Agile offers flexibility to make it happen. With the changing market dynamics and the challenges posed by the digital technologies, this flexibility is very much needed to ‘test and switch’. It further helps to keep a check on the business priorities and work accordingly.

• Focus is on the business value

While innovation is the process, customer experience forms the core of every initiative. Ultimately, when business value is kept intact, it will enhance the customer experience. Agile helps to sync in the technology and the business objectives, as it enables teams to test the technology and understand whether it really brings business value or not.

Hence, with Agile you begin with the ‘why’ and the approach gets aligned with the ultimate business objectives and the value it brings for it. Another great strength that enables this is the transparency that Agile approach brings in the development process. This eases out the process and teams are able to take decisions more confidently.

• Cuts down the risks

When it comes to innovation and taking radical decisions related to the same, it is important for teams to take all the possible risks into account. In a digitally connected space, there is negligible scope for failure. With Agile approach, teams are able to foster practices such as constant communication, continuous testing, and inclusive feedback by the end of every sprint. This confirms that nothing is missed out and all the issues are addressed. This gives full scope for innovation and offbeat actions. When the risks are low, teams are much more confident to try something new and beat the redundancy.

• More collaboration and shared responsibility

As we have discussed above, Agile brings more transparency and opens all the possible communication channels. This enables more collaboration between team members on various grounds. The ideas of self-management, creativity, and knowledge-sharing are encouraged to enable continuous update and learning. Moreover, in an agile set-up the responsibility to ensure quality and performance is shared. Hence, the success and failure is shared by all. This helps to come up with innovative ideas and experiment them along with guidance and support from the team.

In this and many ways, Agile encourages continuous improvement and innovation, which helps businesses to get competitive and become disruptive market performers. On the whole, it helps to mould the future of the domain in all possible ways.

In Conclusion

Agile development and DevOps have been redefining the development and testing space for a long time now. Enterprises need more flexibility in their application development process, as it will help them to experiment and adopt new technologies for building competencies. Staying competent in the marketplace is absolutely critical and more than that it is important to stay profitable. Enterprises that have not evolved with time and have not adopted technology trends, have eventually failed to sustain. Agile approach helps enterprises to build a more collaborative and flexible culture to foster innovation.

Cigniti has successfully supported variants of Agile, be it Scrum, ATDD, BDD etc. With larger organizations, we have helped scale Agile using frameworks like SAFe, SoS etc. While Agile works best with a collocated model, we have also leveraged our Distributed Agile Testing Framework to support a global delivery model.

Check out our Agile Testing capabilities to leverage our matured and proven test approach that has the ability to seamlessly integrate with client’s agile development processes or hybrid development processes.