What is End-To-End (E2E) testing?
First off, let us clarify what E2E testing even means. Principally, it is an activity that simulates real user scenarios from beginning to end. From the end user’s point of view, the application is tested for its functionalities, which create a business flow. Each component in the flow(s) is essential for the software’s successful performance.
These types of tests enable you to validate the whole system and to ensure that all its functionalities and features work properly. Furthermore, it allows you to detect business logic gaps and regression errors, as well as to examine integrations between services to ensure correct performance across different environments.
All in all, E2E testing is an essential activity for ensuring quality, reliability, and usability of software applications. Traditionally, it is done manually and takes place at the end of the entire software development process.
Why is transforming E2E testing important?
Modern applications are built using countless elements, all deployed on an ecosystem of infrastructure layers comprised multiple parts that work together. This level of complexity opens up an enormous number of potential unexpected failures. Due to the fact that in waterfall, software testing, together with E2E testing, takes place only at the very end, one’s teams spend more time on the whole project than they really need to. There will probably be a lot of retesting and eventually, they could even face disastrous consequences.
On the other hand, in Agile, E2E testing requires to be executed more frequently. By pursuing it that way, potential defects will be detected and corrected faster, while preventing new bugs from going further into production. This is especially helpful when adding new changes to the application.
Therefore, to accelerate the process without sacrificing the application’s quality, it is important to properly transform E2E testing as well. Following a modern approach also simplifies it for your teams and saves budget.
Barrier 1
Uncertainty about responsibilities and roles
A reason for distress in modernizing E2E testing may be that you are unsure about the new roles that come with digital transformation and how to assign the responsibilities to your group members. After all, digital transformation is a big change which needs a lot of planning.
In waterfall, testers work closely with each other as a group while performing E2E testing, fostering communication and collaboration. You may think that Agile could make the communication difficult. At first glance, breaking up the code and splitting the functionalities into different scrum teams may seem like an activity which only provides new barriers. But let us reassure you: it does not.
In Agile, the teams work with smaller junks of the code and in more frequent cycles. This approach allows them to detect and correct defects earlier. On the one hand, this saves your teams a huge amount of time, and on the other hand, it increases effectiveness and minimizes business risk.
To overcome the challenge of potential uncertainty when transforming E2E testing, you should make some preparation steps. First, be clear, and communicate it to your employees, that E2E testing needs to be taken into the teams in the future. Secondly, set instructions on who will be responsible for the cross teams coordination, including E2E initiatives. Once this is cleared out, you can be sure the consistency of your product’s or service’s quality as a whole will be in place.
Barrier 2
No test automation
Although automation is not applicable for all software testing aspects, it definitely is for E2E testing. And this is often overseen.
As you probably know, E2E testing is, in most cases, done completely manually. But performing these tests again and again by hand is extremely time-consuming and often error-prone. Moreover, in order for them to succeed, your people need to have a certain technical expertise. Test automation provides a remedy for all these aspects.
Automating as many E2E test cases as possible provides your company with enormous advantages, as it ensures an overall faster go-to-market process by giving you a consistent, production-like test coverage of your entire system.
This approach does not only save a tremendous amount of time but also allows your teams to write new code for additional tests, which may have not been thought of before. In this way, you can check different scenarios and cover even more functionality.
The cherry on top? Test automation allows even non-technical personnel to work with it.
Barrier 3
Single test repositories
Another big barrier is working with single test repositories.
Big projects tend to be complex, which leads to tons of data QA and testing teams will use. If you choose to let your groups store all of it in one place only, this will create a mess at some point. Over time, the amount of data will increase to a huge extent, which will dramatically slow your project down and even cause sudden breakdowns of the system.
A mono repository is additionally critical if your testing teams use different toolsets. They are forced to have multiple frameworks living together in order for the system to function properly. Your teams also need to ensure that any integration system supports every single toolset. This only complicates their day-to-day work life.
Instead, you should let your teams work with multiple repositories, as suggested by the agile methodology. Each repository will then contain only the data it is concerned about and support your testers toolsets. This lowers the chance of them blocking each other as well as of sudden system breakdowns. In addition, decomposing helps to decrease project complexity and lets your testers work more independently.
Let’s stop worrying about transforming E2E testing
We have gone through the process of digital transformation ourselves, including E2E testing. During the process, we have encountered the above mentioned challenges and figured we should help others to best smoothen their paths.
Our broad technical and methodological knowledge allowed us to build proper testOps solutions around this topic to close the gap. In them, we cover every criteria a successful and suiting digital transformation needs.
If you need help with your digital transformation, simply reach out to us or download our testOps white paper for free.