Agile vs DevOps mobile app testing: analyzing the major differences
Both Agile and DevOps aim to accelerate time to market, boost software quality, and provide tremendous customer satisfaction. However, their approach to reaching objectives during testing mobile apps differs.
At a moment’s notice, the COVID-19 pandemic has changed habitual business environments. It forced companies to significantly expedite the pace of digital transformation journeys, in which developing mobile apps is an essential step towards success.
By helping businesses stay in touch with customers and in loop with their needs, mobile solutions contribute to brand awareness and, more importantly, support users during lockdowns marked by multiple restrictions.
By 2023, the worldwide revenue from mobile apps will comprise $935 billion, while the annual number of mobile app downloads globally will swell up to almost 300 billion. TikTok only passed the 66-million download mark in August 2021!
Considering such booming popularity of mobile solutions and the need to curtail software delivery time, organizations with greater frequency rely on Agile and DevOps.
Despite the similarities, the testing approach within each methodology differs. In the article, I’ll cover the most crucial gaps between them to keep in mind.
Mobile app testing: value for software development
With the growing complexity of mobile apps and rising demands of fastidious end-users who note even the slightest flaws, software quality comes to the fore. About four years ago, the probability of mobile site visitors abandoning the app because of increased page loading time reached 123%, just imagine the current figures!
The focus on IT solution soundness during the development process helps improve CX, increase users’ loyalty, and assist businesses in staying competitive in the post-pandemic era.
However, reaching five-star reviews is a challenging task, that requires a complex QA approach to ensure smooth operation of mobile solutions. To ease it, organizations perform tests on real devices, as the accuracy of results will be the highest (if compared to the limitations that simulators or emulators usually have).
Agile and DevOps mobile app testing: distinctive features
Both methodologies can work miracles when concerning releasing quality software at short notice. By evaluating and considering differences in the Agile and DevOps testing processes, it’s much easier to choose the fit-for-purpose approach to delivering good-to-go code on the projects. Let’s have a closer look.
Agile testing brief overview
Focused on a shift-left technique, iterative client-enabled feedback cycles, and cross-functional collaboration, Agile testing is based on an incremental method. To put it short: it’s when small parts of stand-alone code representing each new feature are verified and delivered to the production environment. The most common practices include Scrum, Kanban, Scrum of Scrums, LeSS, SAFe, etc.
Typically, sprint length comprises about 2–4 weeks, during which QA teams analyze software requirements, develop testing documentation, and perform required quality assurance activities. As a result, software testing engineers roll out shippable software at the end of each sprint. This way perfectly fits the projects with frequently changing business and technical demands.
DevOps testing brief overview
By bridging the gap between development and operations teams and ensuring that developers and QA engineers are always on the same page, DevOps testing aims at automated verification and deployment of code during rapid releases (which are the parts of CI/CD pipelines). Extensive test automation and continuous testing allow QA teams to significantly accelerate time to market and deploy code to the production environment every few hours. Unlike Agile testing, specialists receive ongoing feedback from automated tools.
Now, let’s look at the essential variations while testing in Agile and DevOps in detail.
- The level of automation
This is where the distinction lies. Within the Agile manner of testing, automation certainly helps meet quality gates and reduce cycle time, especially regarding effort-consuming regression verifications. However, there is no such rule to automate all test cases all the time.
In turn, DevOps testing of mobile products is thought of as an automated-first process due to continuous integration, delivery, deployment, and testing techniques. Applied in complex, they allow automating as many tests as possible, performing ongoing software updates, optimizing test coverage, gaining prompt feedback, and increasing build stability.
2. Utilized toolkit
The testing toolset within both approaches varies depending on the organization, project specifics and stages, the level of teams’ expertise, budget, and other characteristics. However, it’s possible to define some ordinary solutions that companies apply to ensure the quality of mobile apps. And here’s how they differ.
What concerns DevOps testing, Zephyr serves to manage test cases and work with issues, ensuring an ongoing testing process. Jenkins is a good fit for continuous integration, as it allows automated test runs each time new code is added to the repository. To ensure continuous delivery and automated configuration of environments, software like Puppet suits well. Continuous monitoring may be achieved with Splunk. For automated mobile testing, companies can choose Appium or TestComplete.
As for Agile QA, during the inside-out approach, the engineers can initiate unit testing using frameworks such as JUnit, proceed with acceptance-level testing applying SoapUI or Cucumber, and result in the user interface verification with the help of Selendroid or other related solutions. Regarding the outside-in testing, the teams may focus on the end-user perspective and compile user stories approved by the product owner and then test smaller parts until they reach the level of unit testing.
Agile testing engineers also make use of test and project management software like JIRA to plan the workload as well as create and describe defects efficiently.
Last but not least. When choosing the toolkit, companies should bear in mind that the effectiveness of the testing process vastly depends on whether they can harmoniously blend in with one another and ensure real-time visibility into the tested software.
3. Approach to communication within teams
Effective team interaction helps project members keep abreast of the latest updates, share progress, obtain feedback, analyze mistakes, and briskly indicate help if needed.
When testing in Agile, the QA teams regularly follow such common Agile ceremonies as sprint planning, review, retrospective, daily stand-ups, bug triage, all serving to ensure high transparency of the testing process and meet set objectives.
DevOps teams are also dependent on communication. And although their meetings aren’t always daily, the QA specialists interact with software engineers on requirements, detected issues, or any other aspects to attain better project performance.
The best of both worlds
The pace of the modern-day tech environment is totally off the chain. With companies like Netflix deploying thousands of times a day, or Amazon — every 11.7 seconds, the speed and quality of delivered functionality have become the need of the hour.
Success doesn’t necessarily mean choosing one approach. Considering individual business needs, organizations can focus on cutting development cycles and enhancing communication through Agile. They can simultaneously establish a CI/CD environment offered by DevOps and roll out sound mobile software of higher quality.
