Interview with an experienced professional
Laszlo Frantz has years of broad experience in the fields of consulting and testing – ranging from tester to test/QA lead to CEO of a consulting company. For this series, we asked him to tackle the topic of “Why do consulting and testing often lead to disaster?”.
QUESTION 1
“Why is software testing often seen as an impediment?”
Answer: “To best answer the question, we should look at the root of most challenges first. What do you think of when you hear software testing? Besides finding defects, you probably think about ensuring good quality, right? A lot of people do. But that is wrong.
Giving good quality to the software has never been the purpose of testing.
In fact, its intention is to evaluate the functionality of a software application, and to give feedback of its current state. It is used to determine whether the developed product meets the specified requirements. Nothing more or less.
If you are in need of good quality for your project, you have to include quality assurance practices.
However, testing teams these days need to provide feedback that is rapid and actionable. This is the part where the Agile methodology offers a remedy.
Modern problems require modern solutions.
Let’s face it: Businesses nowadays desire functioning products which they can hand over to their end users as soon as possible. But how do we achieve great speed? The answer is Agile.
Agile testing enables working with very fast feedback from the system, which basically means that you can react to sudden changes in the code as soon as they occur. By working in short and more frequent iterations, Agile teams accelerate their delivery without sacrificing the product’s quality in any aspect.
If you haven’t introduced this methodology to your teams yet, you should most certainly start now.”
QUESTION 2
“So, what are the obstacles in testing? And what would be the consequences if companies refused to consider the Agile testing methodology?”
Answer: “One common procedure during classic software development is that development and testing teams work separately from one another and by different methodologies. While developers usually follow Agile practices, testers, however, work with the Waterfall methodology. This process often results in certain functionalities being left untested, because in the Waterfall methodology, testers start their work only after the whole product has already been developed. Even analyzing the requirements starts late sometimes.
A lack of automated test cases and communication which come hand in hand with this procedure can – and surely will – cause delays.
Nonetheless, modern software development is built completely different. There, software testers are introduced to the Agile environment as well, and work aligned with developers. The outcome? Less time-to-market.
Focus more on predictability for higher efficiency!
Predictability plays an incredibly important role if you want to accelerate your delivery process. What should my new features do? What will happen if something is missing or done wrong? All these questions get answered during the testing process, which – in traditional methodologies – takes place at the very end of the development life cycle. Operating in this way will never allow the teams to achieve predictability.
Fortunately, Agile takes good care of this aspect as well. In its framework, testing becomes continuous and is done throughout the whole development process. Predictability becomes a high priority, while defects are being eliminated in early stages of the development life cycle.
If companies refused to take a closer look at the Agile method, establishing themselves among the market leaders will sooner or later become a huge obstacle for them. Years ago, enterprises were looking for products of very high quality. But now, their focus shifted to having an application in store that they can sell to their consumers fast.
Companies need to adapt to keep their place in the market.”
QUESTION 3
“How can our readers best enter the world of Agile?”
Answer: “In order to start Agile testing, you will have to start your digital transformation in a way suitable for your teams. The best possible approach for your transformation that I recommend is by entering the world of testOps. I did it myself like this.
In case you are not familiar with testOps, you should check out this post about the top three reasons why it is the future of software testing.
Aside from combining QA processes, operations, and the best testing practices, testOps also extends automation through all stages in the development life cycle to achieve sped-up delivery of innovative software.
This means that testOps improves test automation throughout
- the unit testing process,
- the web services layer,
- the functional testing procedure,
- the integration testing process, and
- the regression testing process.
Day executions get scheduled and triggered automatically. But it does not stop there – even processes like the decision-making in quality gates become automated.
In this manner, the whole team performs continuous testing and delivery, while reducing their client’s overall costs. Visit out testOps Lab to get a glimpse of what we can do thanks to testOps.”
Pro tip: If you want to start climbing the ladder of success with testOps, download our white paper.
Part 3: Addressing the disastrous outcome of both
If you want to know how the interview went on and learn more about what the disastrous outcome of both aspects could look like, check out our part 3!
