Agile testing, E2E testing, Customer Experience Testing, Incremental testing, Continuous Integration (CI), Context Driven testing are current services in the software testing arena that is catching up very fast.

Today the major focus while planning and strategizing a testing solution is on customer satisfaction and end user experience. While the above focus forms the basic expectation, the approach to achieve this emphasizes on delivering working software quicker with the defined quality ensuring customer involvement throughout the delivery. Hence Continuous Integration and Incremental testing works best to ensure working functionality being delivered faster.

Challenges

o Context-driven testing is biased towards rapid feedback and adaptability

o Detailed test planning doesn’t work

· Not enough time

· Too many changes

· Defining entry and exit criteria as Iterations happens very fast and there is no dedicated window for testing.

o With frequent iterations, clumsy code OR incomplete functionality gets delivered for testing

Approach

o A good regression test suite to compliment the functionality testing of new features

o Some amount of non-functional testing

o Some focus on user experience testing

o And Last but not the least for testing some exploratory testing

Testers should be co-locate with developers and analysts to be on the same page and be abreast with the changes made / agreed to the functionality. Encourage lots of communication between all stake holders. Address important risks.

Testing Tools

Use of a complete test management tool in such dynamic testing solutions is highly recommended. A tool that, comes with a capability to manage from test requirements, to create a test suite to keep a record of test execution and closure of defects.

These tool also help in reducing the overall testing time and effort.

Toward QA

However, as with everything else, ideal results of software testing can only be achieved when 'best practices' are followed. When development companies are sure that they can deliver on the quality front, they provide with something that has come to be known as 'Quality Assurance'. This is something like a life assurance, given out by insurance companies. Basically, the software vendor will guarantee that for a fixed period of time, they are under a contract with you to keep your software absolutely up-to-date at a nominal cost.