In today’s world of agile development, good alignment and communication between developers, testers, and business analysts is essential. The agile process relies heavily on the ability to quickly define accurate requirements that can then quickly be communicated to testers and developers as the source of truth for their coding and test creation. As developers ship features, testers quickly validate them, and the results of this process must be visible back on the requirement so that companies can understand the risk involved with shipping those particular features.
While the process may seem straightforward, in practice it is far from it, with many handoffs between individuals, teams, and systems. As many legacy ALM platforms have become outdated and unable to support the emerging trends related to agile requirements management, development, and testing teams have shifted to best of breed solutions for their individual functions, allowing them to stay current with the latest trends. The total amount of tools involved in the software development lifecycle in even the smallest organization can be mind numbing, and to make things worse, they are usually poorly integrated at best.
One of the most risky handoffs in the Agile tool chain is between requirements definition/management and test case creation/execution. With Agile, requirements are constantly being groomed, updated, and changed based on customer feedback. As the requirements change, there is risk that a tester is not updating their test cases to account for the new changes in the requirement. This means that the tester might be running a test that would incorrectly fail the requirement in its new form, or even worse, incorrectly pass the requirement when it should really fail it. Ultimately, the end user is impacted as this can result in a defect making its way out into the production environment, even though the test team is certain they have executed their test plan in its entirety.
Additionally, testing has evolved to take on many different forms, including exploratory, automated, performance, and security testing. The number of tests required to validate that a requirement is truly “accepted” can be in the dozens, if not more. Each of these testing types generates it’s own outputs and reports, so trying to trace back all these tests directly to requirements can be a nightmare. Luckily, there are test case management systems like ours, qTest Manager, that can consolidate the results from these various tools into one central view of traceability and impact. But still, without a properly integrated requirements management solution, it is impossible to make the full circle connection back to what requirements are ready for release and which would be risky to put into production.
Given the risk in poorly integrated requirements management and testing tools, what is an Agile team to do in this situation?
QASymphony and Blueprint have partnered together to bring together best-of-breed requirements management and test management in one integrated offering, with complete visibility from requirement definition and change to test creation, execution, and defect resolution. The tools can be integrated directly or through leading connectors to popular Agile ALM’s such as JIRA, Rally, and VersionOne. With Blueprint, qTest Platform, and an Agile ALM, there is a best-of-breed solution for business analyst, developer, and tester all integrated for seamless visibility and collaboration.
Agile is a new methodology with new challenges all its own, both in regard to process as well as tools. Teams need to acquire the best tools they can to stay relevant with the endless changes in the Agile development space. However, to reach their full potential, they will need to choose requirements management, test management, and defect management solutions that can easily and effectively integrate together to allow for the communication and collaboration that is required within Agile. With our new partnership, QASymphony and Blueprint aim to be the first join solution that can provide best-of-breed requirements and test management for small businesses and enterprises alike, with the ability to choose an integrated Agile ALM for defect management.
