With agile, testing must advance with each sprint, and testers are responsible for ensuring that new modifications do not impair the application’s current functionality. Regression testing is the term for this.
Regression testing makes sure that the application’s older features continue to function properly and that recent updates haven’t introduced any new bugs. Whether there is a major software change or a minor, localized change, regression testing should always be used. Teams need to make sure that updated code doesn’t interfere with previously written code and that unaltered code continues to function as intended.
Agile development involves regular build cycles and ongoing application modification. Regression testing is therefore crucial to agile development. A testing team should create the regression suite as early in the product development process as possible to ensure successful regression testing in Agile. They ought to carry on improving it in addition to development sprints.
Methods for Regression Testing
Regression testing may be done in three different ways. The strategy you choose will depend on your situation, the size of your codebase, the quantity of testers on your team, and the resources you have at your disposal.
Retest everything: This means executing each and every test again on the updated codebase. This will isolate regressions if the tests were well-designed. With a large codebase, this method might not be practical due to its resource-intensive nature.
Retesting selectively: In certain cases, you can isolate a portion of your current tests to cover all or nearly all of the “moving parts” in your codebase. Rerunning that selective set will then be sufficient to find regressions throughout the codebase.
Retesting with priority is applied to big codebases. The code paths, user actions, and functional areas that are likely to have bugs are all covered by the priority tests. You can finish the other tests after these have finished.
Automated Regression Testing: Crucial Points to Remember
Regression testing necessitates continuous practice. Regression testing must be a part of every release cycle to make sure that new features haven’t broken anything.
Not every regression results from a routine bug fix or new feature. They may also arise from updates to databases, new browser versions, or other modifications to the environment. Regression may also be a result of security or performance issues. Automating reliable and consistent regression cases frees up manual testers to concentrate on testing different environments and combining intricate cases.
When devising an automated regression testing strategy, take into account the following:
Is automation appropriate for the scope of your project?
Large and medium-sized projects benefit greatly from automated testing, particularly when testing software that has several subsystems, like web apps or multiplayer games. Automation will not yield a high return on investment and might not be beneficial for a small or short-term project.
Manual tests serve as a foundation.
You risk wasting time writing automated regression tests against a feature that is unstable if you attempt to write them against a feature that is still under development. Regression testing should therefore only be done after you have at least one manual test run and passed. You can then compare the outcomes of the automated test and the manual run.
Aim less than complete coverage.
Seventy to ninety percent of repeatable and effective manual tests should be covered by regression testing scripts. Regression testing is not appropriate for the 10–30% of test cases that either isolate bugs only once or consistently report false positives or negatives. Regression test coverage of 100% is actually less effective and may result in resource waste.
Difficulties with Regression Automation
The following challenges that your team should be aware of can impede automation efforts:
The suites of automated regression tests for maintenance are not perpetually valid. Any changes to the project should be promptly reflected in a test suite. To identify outdated test cases, the test team should assess automated regression test suites.
False positives: tests that declare a product unsuccessful even though there are none. Timing problems, out-of-date test cases, and other objective factors could be the cause of this. Additionally, “flaky tests” with erroneous coding or design that yield inconsistent results could be the source.
Why Does Agile Development Need Regression Testing?
The team concentrates on the functionality scheduled for the sprint within an agile framework. But even though the team focuses on a specific product area, it is unrealistic to expect them to consider the risks that their changes may pose to the system as a whole. Assuming adequate coverage, a regression test will highlight areas throughout the codebase impacted by the team’s most recent modifications.
Regression tests should be run as soon as changes are made; ideally, this can be done automatically as part of the build process. The team might already be making changes to other parts of the system when feedback is delayed.
Agile Teams’ Challenges with Regression Testing
Regression testing can be challenging for an agile team due to a number of common issues:
Modifications: Customers and management occasionally make drastic adjustments to the specifications. These adjustments have the potential to be so erratic that entire iterations are lost. This puts any test automation plan at significant risk.
Teams must wait until the functionality is ready to use traditional, test-last tools with record-and-playback features. Cannot use record-and-playback testing tools. As a result, in an agile setting, conventional automated functional testing tools are ineffective.
Regression test growth: Regression tests get bigger with every sprint and become unmanageable very quickly in large projects. Your team should automate regression testing, but they should also regularly review and eliminate outdated or ineffective tests to keep the process manageable.
Absence of communication: The automation testing team, business analysts, developers, and stakeholders should all be in effective communication with one another. This guarantees that all users have a clear understanding of the modifications made to the product, including which features are new and need regression testing, which are changing and need careful testing, and which are deprecated or removed and don’t require regression testing.
Specialized testing abilities: as the project progresses, specialized abilities will be required for performance and integration testing, among other test areas. To gather and plan testing requirements, the team should make use of test specialists from other departments within the organization or from within the agile team.
Developing an Agile Team Regression Testing Approach
Prior to developing a plan for regression testing:
- assemble all of the test cases you plan to run.
- Determine how the test cases can be improved.
- Calculate how long you think the test cases will take to complete.
- Describe what and how can be automated.
Developing a plan for regression testing:
Utilizing test cases for sanity and smoke
Testing teams can save time by performing smoke and sanity testing prior to regression testing. Before more testing of a new release, a run-through of an application’s basic functionality is known as “sanity testing,” which formally verifies that functionality functions as intended.
A subset of test cases that can run quickly and test key product workflows, like login and startup, are required for smoke testing.
Sanity and smoke tests can be used to rapidly determine whether an application has too many bugs to justify additional testing, such as regression testing. Regression testing on a product that doesn’t load or allow login is not as good as this. Instead, look into why hundreds or thousands of regression tests are failing.
identifying areas prone to errorsSort the test cases into priority based on the most important and often used features. Regression tests can be run more quickly and frequently, the regression test suite can be reduced, and maintenance time can be saved when test cases are chosen according to priority.
Examining bug reports
There are tools for both error tracking and regression testing that integrate. This gives you detailed information about what transpired during a regression test, including the precise line of code that was impacted, why it failed, and whether it succeeded or failed. In order to help you locate and troubleshoot the problem, error tracking tools can also provide you with screenshots and other metrics regarding regression testing failures.
Add the test cases that are most likely to fail. Certain parts of the program are so prone to errors that even a small coding change can cause them to malfunction. These unsuccessful test cases can be monitored throughout the product cycle and added to the regression test suite.
Prioritizing test cases
A testing team that uses a risk-based approach chooses test cases based on which application areas will be most impacted by project changes. They also assign a priority ranking to them. The product categories with the highest perceived risk of quality problems are the focus of regression testing.
Interaction
It is important for testers to keep in touch with product owners in order to track and evaluate requirements changes. They ought to get in touch with developers to find out which changes were made during an iteration.
A Novel Method for Setting Priorities for Regression Tests
Regression test suites can become a significant burden for agile teams, which operate quickly. Prioritizing regression tests is essential for large projects, but teams are currently compelled to make decisions based on imperfect metrics like unit test code coverage and defect density, as well as “tribal knowledge” about error-prone product areas and anecdotal evidence from production failures.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, mastering regression testing is pivotal in ensuring the success of Agile development. The seamless integration of manual testing in software testing processes, combined with a judicious blend of manual and automation testing, is essential for robust quality assurance. Embracing these ideas not only enhances testing efficiency but also fosters agility, empowering teams to deliver high-quality software in the ever-evolving Agile landscape.
