Is Test Pyramid still a Challenge?

For the past few years, most of the organizations are trying to move towards shift left testing and also implement the test pyramid model. But the question here is are they really successful? When we talk about the test pyramid, the 70% of testing should be covered under unit test, 20% on the APIs and 10% on the selenium UI tests. I have also had many discussion with my friends and colleagues who work in different organization on these challenges. Most common reasons development might give out is they dint have enough time to cover the unit test. And most of the QA testers focus on Selenium test rather than increasing their focus to API and Integrated testing.

While most of organization have moved to Agile, and expecting to have a full stack developers in the team, this test pyramid is quite possible.

• Developers should not regret the time spent in writing unit test, it is more valuable. The time spent on writing unit test will definitely save their time in fixing the system defects at the later time.
• If organization starts to have CI/CD pipelines, then integrating the unit test is quite easy and also that should be considered as a quality gate.
• On the other side testers should start focusing on testing APIs and increase the integrated testing. This will help them to provide an early feedback to the development team.
• Across the industry we see the testing team focusing more on Automated UI tests and with less focus on integrated tests.
• As most teams have moved to Agile, the role of developers and testers should not be static. Testers can join the developers in writing unit tests and developers can join testers in writing API tests.
• These steps would definitely help to identify the defects at the early stage with minimal leakage at the later stage.

The whole agile team should take the accountability of improving the quality of their product.

Every organizational leader would love to see this model working and it has started happening in many organizations. Although we might have lot of operational and technical challenges but this is still possible.