The Need for Speed Creates New Challenges for QA and Testing
To meet the growing demands of digital, enterprises are increasingly adopting Agile and DevOps principles. However, many testing and QA departments are not properly equipped to meet the requirements of these new environments. They still view testing as a linear activity and haven’t taken the same holistic approach to optimizing the entire lifecycle in the way that development teams have with their adoption of Agile.
In our work with enterprise development and test organizations, we see a number of common challenges in Agile environments:
- Uncertainty in prioritizing test cases
- Too much time spent clarifying and communicating test requirements
- A huge backlog of test cases and rising test environment costs
- High test script maintenance costs due to frequent changes to applications
- Too much time spent on application fixes
- Inefficient use of resources spent executing similar testing steps
- Time wasted conducting testing that won’t impact quality or coverage
- Difficulty accessing and managing test data
- A lack of expertise with the latest technologies and tools to provide predictive insights