Enterprises that strive to be agile need to operate accordingly on all levels, otherwise they lose the increased productivity or cannot really profit from the practices. Businesses often employ agile management methods or modules like Scrum but are far too cautious in doing so.
Test automation as well as «Continuous Integration and Delivery» are often the topics in which they are too cautious. But these methods are crucial to the development of agile software. Applying these correctly can allow a business to make releases at any given point since there is always a releasable artefacts at hand. Since quality is part of the product an the code from the start, one can also move away from the «waterfall in the sprint» through the use of «Test Driven Development».
Test Automation helps businesses to execute automated routine tests and therefore not to affect release cycles. This makes resources available which assume tasks like the testing of sectors which cannot be conducted automatically. But automated tests can only check if for example clicking a certain button will result in the correct function (so called functional tests).
Tests that are to define how an application «feels» and if the buttons are all in the right position in a mobile application (so called UX-tests) are still of a manual nature and teams typically perform them in an explorative way.
As always it is important to find the right mix of automated and manual tests. The use of automated tests lead to many enterprises not distinguishing between testers and developers. Ultimately, the development of one of these tests becomes equal to the development of software.
In many agile organisations the development department blends with the testing department in reality. Some don’t distinguish between the two even at the recruitment stage but lead all candidates through the same cycles. It is only at the end of this cycle that they decide which section the candidate is suitable for.
