Testing is Now More About Defect Prevention than Defect Detection
Through the implementation of DevOPS and Agile, engineering teams and product management teams collaborate and communicate intensely, multiple times a day. Developers are merged into a testing cycle or testers are merged into the development cycle right from the early stages. With these changes in the role of a tester, the scope for Quality Assurance (QA) has broadened tremendously. Be it a software developer intest (SDET)or a QA engineer, as a member of a collaborative team, a modern day’s tester now has a cadence similar to that of a software development engineer. These changes have brought in two major essential parameters which every one should adopt:• Shift-Left Testing: Where testing is part and parcel of continuous integration(CI)
• Shift-Right Testing: Where the horizon of testing is broadened after receiving feedback from the endusers.
ShiftLeft has been the most preferred word in testing parlance in the past decade and has enabled the evolution of quality assurance into something more than just testing. The concept of ShiftLeft has been enabled to operate right from the requirements stage and increasing demand for services, such as requirements validation and requirements assurance, which establishes the strategic role played by quality assurance in the IT industry. Adoption of Agile, DevOps and CI/CD have further aided shiftleft principles and it is a common understanding that testing cannot be limited to the end of the SDLC as was done in the past.
• Shift-Left Testing: Where testing is part and parcel of continuous integration (CI)
• Shift-Right Testing: Where the horizon of testing is broadened after receiving feedback from the end-users.
ShiftLeft has been the most preferred word in testing parlance in the past decade and has enabled the evolution of quality assurance into something more than just testing. The concept of ShiftLeft has been enabled to operate right from the requirements stage and increasing demand for services, such as requirements validation and requirements assurance, which establishes the strategic role played by quality assurance in the IT industry. Adoption of Agile, DevOps and CI/CD have further aided shiftleft
principles and it is a common understanding that testing cannot be limited to the end of the SDLC as was done in the past.
Termed DevQA integration or Quality Assistance, this new model focuses on streamlining the development process itself and creating tools and environments that outline bugs or defects that can be avoided. In short it is all about defect prevention.
DevQA integration advocates an enhanced model where the role of the SDET(Software Development Engineer in Test) moves beyond just creation and execution of unit tests.
The SDET will now be involved in the creation of:
• Unit tests and TDD(test driven development)scripts which will integrate with entire solution
• Stubs and services around the application in development
• Methods for synthetic data generation through services/backend automation
• Definition of testing toolsets/environments early in the lifecycle
Unlike the traditional notion of testing where QA specialists are active only after development, SDETs work in tandem with developers and understand the underlying code, there by enabling testing at the unit level and extending it to the functional level with acceptance and product performance testing.
Significant benefits of enhancing the role of SDET across the lifecycle will be evident only in the development and operations side of the lifecycle. The efficiencies gained during the development phase creates indirect yet significant impact on the QA space.
Disruptions by Behavior driven and Test driven development(BDD and TDD):
Developers often commence development with ambiguous test expectations since requirements tend to be loosely structured or unstructured at the beginning. The use of nonstandardized methods of defining requirements, interdependencies, workflows, business and data rules often result in improper and incomplete impact assessment, leading to modifications and changes after many stages of development, or during the first stage of testing.
The DevQA model disrupts the existing practice with the introduction of BDD and TDD implementation right from the requirements stage. Feature analysts are injected into the requirements phase to define BDD scripts from user stories and SDET is introduced in the development stage to define TDD scripts from BDD scripts.
The most significant benefit of a BDD+TDD approach is the overall reduction in cost of quality by:
• Structured and automatable script definitions from both requirements/test design automation feeding into execution automation.
• Early detection of defects in requirements and test.
• Facilitating early UAT (user acceptance testing) due to elaboration of requirements at a granular level.
Be it in an exclusively digital or legacy context, or in the more prevalent digital frontend and legacy backend model, DevQA integration will help increase efficiencies tremendously. As the entire process of validation starts left and plays a more strategic role by incorporating BDD when defining features, development in itself becomes more accurate thereby setting the stage for effective defect prevention.
The subsequent BDD+TDD approach for all subsequent stages, new initiatives, and enhancements further strengthens the SDLC and implementation by a skilled SDET with development capabilities unit and functional testing, as well as performance testing, enables organizations to implement the ideal Agile setup that truly prevents errors.
Termed DevQA integration or Quality Assistance, this new model focuses on streamlining the development process itself and creating tools and environments that outline bugs or defects that can be avoided. In short it is all about defect prevention.
DevQA integration advocates an enhanced model where the role of the SDET(Software Development Engineer in Test) moves beyond just creation and execution of unit tests.
The SDET will now be involved in the creation of:
• Unit tests and TDD(test driven development)scripts which will integrate with entire solution
• Stubs and services around the application in development
• Methods for synthetic data generation through services/backend automation
• Definition of testing toolsets/environments early in the lifecycle
Unlike the traditional notion of testing where QA specialists are active only after development, SDETs work in tandem with developers and understand the underlying code, there by enabling testing at the unit level and extending it to the functional level with acceptance and product performance testing.
Significant benefits of enhancing the role of SDET across the lifecycle will be evident only in the development and operations side of the lifecycle. The efficiencies gained during the development phase creates indirect yet significant impact on the QA space.
Disruptions by Behavior driven and Test driven development(BDD and TDD):
Developers often commence development with ambiguous test expectations since requirements tend to be loosely structured or unstructured at the beginning. The use of nonstandardized methods of defining requirements, interdependencies, workflows, business and data rules often result in improper and incomplete impact assessment, leading to modifications and changes after many stages of development, or during the first stage of testing.
The DevQA model disrupts the existing practice with the introduction of BDD and TDD implementation right from the requirements stage. Feature analysts are injected into the requirements phase to define BDD scripts from user stories and SDET is introduced in the development stage to define TDD scripts from BDD scripts.
The most significant benefit of a BDD+TDD approach is the overall reduction in cost of quality by:
• Structured and automatable script definitions from both requirements/test design automation feeding into execution automation.
• Early detection of defects in requirements and test.
• Facilitating early UAT (user acceptance testing) due to elaboration of requirements at a granular level.
Be it in an exclusively digital or legacy context, or in the more prevalent digital frontend and legacy backend model, DevQA integration will help increase efficiencies tremendously. As the entire process of validation starts left and plays a more strategic role by incorporating BDD when defining features, development in itself becomes more accurate thereby setting the stage for effective defect prevention.
The subsequent BDD+TDD approach for all subsequent stages, new initiatives, and enhancements further strengthens the SDLC and implementation by a skilled SDET with development capabilities unit and functional testing, as well as performance testing, enables organizations to implement the ideal Agile setup that truly prevents errors.
