Software Quality Assurance & Testing Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for software quality control experts, automation engineers, and software testers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am working in a agile testing project. I am new in testing field, please help me if somebody knows the answer.
My questions are,
Are test cases needed in agile testing or do we directly write automation scripts?
If our team did development and push it to testing, what should be my first approach? Should I directly write automation scripts?
I don't like to do monkey testing.
Please help me to clarify my doubts.
My thoughts
Are test cases needed in agile testing or do we directly write automation scripts?
I would strongly recommend you write test cases first and then do a feasibility study of which tests should be automated after discussion with stakeholders.
If our team did development and push it to testing, what should be my first approach? Should I directly write automation scripts?
For the initial builds, you should first do a round of smoke testing and then look at which scenarios/tests need to be automated
In agile projects every sprint timeline we have:
No automation, More informal scripted tests (test cases), Less Exploratory testing
Commonly testing in agile is started when new code arrives, but in this case testing loses precious time. Ideally tester should participate in scrum meetings to have full understanding of user stories, so he could represent end user interests. This early phase gives you sketches of test cases.
Then as software arrives you check it with this informal test cases (extending them according to your new knowledge of the software). This is the first phase of testing, scripted manual testing (there should not be too much exploration) to check basic functions of software. This is how you test new functionality.
More automated tests, Less scripted tests (test cases), and Exploratory testing as a separate part of testing process
As soon as core functionality becomes stable (business process or part of it could be accomplished) you should start with automation. Core business functionality should be validated with automated tests. This will save you time on regression & verification to do exploratory testing without scripted test cases but with great mind efforts. Be sure Exploratory testing is nearly useless if the basic features are not working.
P.S.: please do not mix Exploratory testing with Monkey testing. The first is about emphasizing the dominant thought process involved in unscripted testing, but second one is about random input to the tested system. Professional tester should not do monkey testing (there is an exception: randomization of automated tests, but generally this is not monkey testing)
