The Challenges We Face in Software Testing Today
In my over 10 years of experience in test automation across thousands of browser and device combinations, the rapid pace of evolving system complexity stands out. As an expert consultant helping large enterprises tackle quality concerns, I have become deeply passionate about this issue.
Modern consumer and business applications now integrate disparate services spanning mobile, SaaS, APIs and more. Code is developed and delivered faster using Agile. And deployment environments leverage dynamically scalable cloud infrastructure.
This new reality puts immense pressure on testing teams. Achieving comprehensive test coverage across interfaces, configurations, and data combinations is incredibly hard. Yet software defects that escape to production can cost end-users and businesses dearly.
Additionally, misalignment between teams often hinders software quality. Product owners can lack technical details in articulating requirements. Developers may make differing technology assumptions. Testers can operate in silos when defining test scenarios and data.
These communication gaps get exponentially harder to reconcile as system scale and team distribution increases. Still, having a shared understanding of expected behavior and associated testing is vital for aligned delivery.
This article consolidates my hands-on experience around two leading techniques to address these problems – test management and behavior driven development. I break down how they can be integrated to boost quality, productivity and confidence in the most demanding environments.
Why Rigorous Test Management is Essential
First, lets explore some key testing anti-patterns that I often see hampering client teams:
- Test cases authored without traceability to product requirements
- Test data not managed for reuse leading to duplication
- Environments provisioned manually or unoptimized
- Progress dashboards lacking real-time accuracy
- Issues identified late downstream causing rework
What stands out is the lack of governance across test activities. Without it, critical information stays fragmented. Resource usage isn’t optimal. Risks get detected too late. Ultimately testing efficiency and effectiveness suffers.
This is where test management aims to help by establishing core capabilities like:
- Centralized suite to manage test artifacts and data
- Associating test coverage to features and stories
- Automated environment configuration
- Scheduling and assignment of test sets
- Consolidated analytics and reporting
By taking a structured approach, test management solutions enhance orchestration, utilization and transparency. Testing workflows become more lean and adaptive to change. Defects are contained sooner avoiding costly downstream impacts.
Management has accurate visibility allowing data-driven tradeoff decisions on quality. Overall confidence builds through the well-governed process and compliance audit trails.
Overview of Behavior Driven Development
Lets shift gears to Behavior Driven Development (BDD) – an extension of test driven development. BDD sets itself apart with 3 key focus areas:
Collaboration
BDD brings together business analysts, developers and testers early to discuss scope, expectations, and edge cases. These sessions aim to reveal differing assumptions, gaps, and ambiguities in a shared forum.
Specification
Behaviors and examples captured during sessions are documented in a natural language vocabulary called Gherkin. These readable descriptions codify expected system responses as automated acceptance tests.
Automation
Development teams directly utilize the Gherkin test scenarios to guide coding efforts. The specifications simultaneously serve as automated checks giving rapid feedback on progress.
This dual focus on collaboration and automation using business terminology is BDDs unique value. Testers gain extensive clarification on capabilities required while developers receive unambiguous direction.
When practiced jointly, BDD delivers a “three amigos” partnership between business, development and quality assurance. This symbiotic relationship propagates shared understanding regarding what users want, how code will deliver it, and how to test expected functionality.
Now that we have context on each approach, we can explore the tangible benefits realized when combining test management and BDD.
Key Integrated Benefits
While test management and BDD are powerful in isolation, uniting them can have profound impacts on productivity, quality and release confidence.
Some synergistic outcomes include:
Increased Communication Flows
BDD specifications formalize expected behaviors from business discussions as executable tests. Test management links these scenarios upstream to product requirements and stories for traceability. This connects conversations to code to validation seamlessly.
Complete Test Coverage
Test management leverages metrics to pinpoint coverage gaps to create missing tests. BDD provides the mechanics to easily automate new scenarios from sessions. Together they enable comprehensive validation.
Reusable Automation
BDD enables reusable test data sets using a tabular format for parameters. Test management facilities like semantic test classifiers and risk-based grouping further optimizes automation suites.
End-to-End Traceability
Integrated BDD testing and test management provides views into interconnections across the delivery lifecycle. Code changes can be analyzed for impact on linked test scenarios and requirements.
Unified interfaces make it simple to construct relationships between test artifacts. Trace links get utilized downstream for root cause analysis and coverage insights upstream.
Lets explore some examples of how test management and BDD work in harmony…
BDD Complements Management Tracking
A core value of test management is tracking validation progress across projects in real-time. Metrics on item pass rates, defect escape velocity, and test execution burden quantify quality and scope health.
BDD brings additional dimensions with tag-based classification of executable specifications. Descriptive labels like @smoke, @regression, and @safety allow segmented reporting for specific scenario groups.
Utilizing a Cucumber reporting plugin like Spark, I configured a dynamic dashboard showing:
- Test status heat maps based on specification tags
- Overall stats on tests passed, failed, skipped
- Charts for historical defect trends
- Comparison views across test runs
This level of robust analytics better informs planning and resource allocation. Focus areas needing more scenarios or stability improvements become apparent.
By unifying these reporting layers, test priorities stay synced to product quality needs. Regression issues get detected fast preventing downstream team disruption. Stakeholders gain a precise picture of progress towards meeting acceptance criteria.
Test Management Supports BDD Collaboration
BDD collaboration works best when conversations stay organized and visible. Test management tools like Zephyr scale BDD adoption by:
- Documenting discussions as requirements or general test cases
- Versioning scenario examples extracted from sessions
- Assigning specification reviews to subject experts
- Tracking approvals for tests to automate
This governance keeps alignment high across groups authoring tests. Automation stays targeted on approved examples instead of tester guesswork.
Utilizing inline test case management also simplifies updating tests triggered by code changes. Impacts can be easily analyzed by linking code commits to associated specifications in tools like Jira.
These capabilities help sustain active BDD collaboration as complexity and team distribution scales. Audit history provides proof of rigorous analysis transforming ideas into executable tests.
Optimizing CI/CD With BDD Test Automation
Having fast and reliable continuous integration pipelines is vital to accelerating delivery of modern systems. BDD test automation offers strong synergies here by:
- Codifying specifications directly in Gherkin for automation frameworks like Cucumber
- Reusing parameters for efficient data-driven testing
- Updating tests to meet evolving specs via Agile management
- Grouping test sets for optimized test runs
I leverage BDD test automation across client pipelines to validate releases continuously. Running these checks in parallel across thousands of browser environments gives quick feedback on quality.
Regression issues get caught fast without blocking deployments using automated rollback. Tests stay focused on the most important flows using risk-based test set selection. My expert tuning has reduced CI durations by 30% while raising code coverage.
These techniques help developers release with high confidence anytime. Management has empirical evidence of features working reliably under load. Automation provides safety nets so teams can sustainably deliver quickly.
Conclusions From the Test Automation Frontlines
As release velocity and quality demands intensify, relying purely on either manual test tracking or scripted UI checks alone tends to eventually stall progress.
That is why sophisticated testing groups urgently need to adopt frameworks marrying test process management with behavior driven techniques.
Integrating solutions like TestRail and Cucumber establish a checks-and-balances partnership. The structure ensures high test coverage tied to requirements. Scenarios codify specifications for reusable test automation. Teams get transparent progress visibility even as complexity scales.
These combined strengths directly mitigate the most pressing challenges in today’s environments – misalignment from poor collaboration and gaps escaping downstream causing delays.
Having led test strategy for numerous enterprise adoptions, I strongly believe blended BDD test automation and centralized management is how modern quality programs can reach the next level.
The most innovative Silicon Valley tech disruptors already live this reality with stunning results. Now is the time for forward-looking software groups to realize the tangible benefits as well.
Adopting these leading practices paves the clear path to mastering testing in modern application development by amplifying feedback, increasing reuse and accelerating delivery. Lets discuss further how my proven integration approach can guide your organization to software delivery excellence.
