The Demands of QA in Agile Development

Agile development has a more obvious place in mobile than any other type of application development.   For those applications with a large enough audience, they will have a continuous stream of feedback.   Addressing those bugs and issues while implementing new suggestions and features at the drop of a hat is the perfect set-up for agile development.

What is sometimes slightly murky in agile development is the role of QA.  In smaller operations, QA can be everyone’s job.   In larger operations, QA can be several teams.   Either way, within the agile paradigm, all aspects of development are, in theory, constantly revisited and re-evaluated so that efforts can be calibrated to real-world business needs at the time of deployment and beyond.

During a typical agile test process, new testing requirements usually arrive in the form of bugs, software enhancements, and new feature requests, all of which need to be addressed rapidly in order to maintain software integrity. Each new request requires new test scripts to be developed.   That sometimes means that those responsible for QA often don’t have enough time to test what they need to and instead, test what others demand. And with more builds, the testing process becomes more challenging still.

Test automation is a huge ally within the agile movement by allowing for the rapid availability and deployment of test code. For QA teams conducting manual tests, automation can be linked into the process to create an extra layer of quality assurance so that if the automated tests for some reason fail, teams can still review specific features manually to address the failure directly. Test automation is a key part of the agile movement because old customer requirements can easily become new customer problems, and agility has a huge hand in minimizing wasted efforts and resources.

To underscore the importance of agility, we even developed our own enterprise products like QMetry Test Management, QMetry Automation Studio, and Synchro with this approach. Being agile means accommodating the rapid changes in the technology landscape as well as maintain compatibility across existing and emerging platforms. Agile QA teams are essential to help organizations move forward with mobile projects whether it’s for internal consumption or external release.