{"id":5645,"date":"2021-07-13T12:59:50","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T12:59:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kovair.com\/blog\/?p=5645"},"modified":"2025-11-10T06:28:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T06:28:08","slug":"agile-testing-overcome-the-top-challenges-in-6-simple-ways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kovair.com\/blogs\/agile-testing-overcome-the-top-challenges-in-6-simple-ways\/","title":{"rendered":"Agile Testing: Overcome the Top Challenges in 6 Simple Ways"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"agile<\/p>\n

The Agile development methodology, which emphasizes immensely the active involvement of clients during the development stage of the projects, is being well accepted in the software development industry. Pushing the traditional waterfall process behind, Agile methodology is being lauded for the streamlined approach it brings to a project’s development.<\/p>\n

Agile brings a clearer picture of the development team’s requirements and development progress to the Client or the customer. The different components of Agile like scrum meetings, retrospective meetings, client calls, and estimation meetings allow a better understanding of requirements between business analysts (the proxy product owner), the Client (actual product owner), developers, and the testers.<\/p>\n

This communication loop functions much faster in Agile than in the traditional waterfall model. Our previous blog on How Agile Development Methodology Leads to a Foolproof Delivery will explain to you more on this.<\/p>\n

But all these advantages at the development and communication end are also coupled with some key challenges at the tester’s end. It is evident that testing is an essential aspect of software development. Being a tester of the Waterfall model, switching to Agile can be a daunting experience. But accepting that as a challenge and following different practices to handle these challenges is your way.<\/p>\n

The new process includes sprint grooming and seizing meetings. Providing estimations on testing a story was not a regular feature in the traditional Waterfall model. Earlier it worked like this: “Give me a specification, I will review it, plan my test strategy, and then test it at the end after receiving a build from the development team.” On the contrary, in Agile, there is no large-scale specification provided. The product and its understanding will evolve during the development, and the testing approach needs to be modified regularly. This in-turn, is a big challenge for the testing team. Likewise, there are some more.<\/p>\n

In the current blog, we will identify some of these significant challenges for you and how to overcome them to deliver your best.<\/p>\n

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    Lack of Descriptive Requirement Specification Documents<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    There are no extensive documents to specify the detailed requirements, but only tiny pieces of information. These could be notes taken during short meetings or team discussions. The basic needs come from the Client through calls or any document mentioning the basic layout. Here, building a long roadmap for testing the project becomes challenging. Being a tester, you are supposed to be highly dependent on the developers to monitor every small progress\/ change made in the code.<\/p>\n

    Attending the story estimation meeting gives more clarity on the complexity of the product. You need to understand the product complexity not as a tester but as a team member. Verifying the requirements gathered by the proxy product owner (business analyst) and building scenarios around it, discussing the risk factor before the development begins is the right way to handle this challenge. These steps can make the life of a tester easy. This also helps a tester take individual lessons to meet the Client’s expectations better, ultimately.<\/p>\n

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      Unexpected Last-Minute Changes In Requirements<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      Agile follows an incremental and iterative model. Here, the possibilities of the sudden change in requirements from the Client’s end remain too high. These unexpected and unscheduled changes may affect the overall development plan and that of the testers too. A change in requirement can be majorly due to two reasons: A. Changes made by Client as per their business needs or B. Changes made by the development team due to some complexity\/limitations of the technology used. Accordingly, the old scenarios to test\/verify the changing features might not be sufficient (or can eventually become invalid too). In simple words, it means a moving target from the tester’s point of view.<\/p>\n

      As a solution to this, you need to try and understand the product from the customer’s point of view (or the business’s point of view). It would be best if you considered all the possible risks and updates that you might come across. A product is always based on some existing technology. Hence, it becomes crucial for you to always keep in mind the basics of that technology. This will help you combat this challenge.<\/p>\n

      [the_ad id=”2867″]<\/p>\n

      Consider the following example:<\/p>\n

      In one of our projects based on Agile Methodology, the Client wanted the content to be in French. But due to some resource crunch at the Client’s end, the translation (which we were going to receive from the Client) remained pending till the day of the release. Receiving the translation at the last moment could have delayed our implementation and led to a further testing delay.<\/p>\n

      But with proper team meetings and discussion with other team members, we came up with an idea. We created a new template for pages and emails in French without using the French language (as we had not received it yet from the Client). We simply prefixed the English content with “FR_”. For instance, for the following text in English \u2013 “Login below to access the website”, we ensured that it displayed as “FR_Login below to access the website”, each time a user opted for a language change. During testing, we made sure that whenever French content was to be displayed, it showed up with the prefix “FR_”. This helped us perform the testing promptly.<\/p>\n

      We were through with the testing and simply changed the content of the template later.<\/p>\n

      \"Test<\/p>\n

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        Limitations In Technical Skills and Automation<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        In Agile, <\/strong>the test cases need to be updated regularly because the criteria keep changing as per the client\u2019s requirement and based on that code at the backend. So, maintaining the full coverage of test cases remains a big challenge.<\/p>\n

        Developers must perform the coding by strictly adhering to the criteria specified in the story by the Product Owner. So, understanding the requirements in the story using mutual discussions and then writing the test cases\/automation scripts will always help a tester cover maximum scenarios.<\/p>\n

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          Communication Gaps<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Communication is the most important part of an Agile environment. In an environment where all the teams are working simultaneously, miscommunication can lead to an improper understanding of requirements, thereby affecting development. In the traditional Waterfall model, the Business analyst drafted the SRS, and after the development team used it to test it. So, the developers and testers to come on the same page used to be the most time-consuming part. Scrum meeting plays a vital role here. Scrum meeting is a daily activity where every team member has to report the following:<\/p>\n