If there is one yardstick that makes or breaks any business in the new, digitally-reincarnated and mercurial world of today, it is — speed.
Even the best of products and services can crumble under the pressure of that unrelenting tick-tock that the market is pulsating with. It is not going to suffice to offer the best to the customer, it has to be done — now, in real-time, before everything goes stale.
That explains the attention and significance that Agile and DevOps teams have acquired in the recent past. These tenets have pervaded almost-all realms of software and business services. The demands of velocity and rigour, hence, also apply to the area of acceptance testing- whereupon one checks the offering from a user’s context and from the dimensions that define acceptance.
In order to attain goals that actually make acceptance-testing live to the swift clocks of today, one can always tap the catalyst of automation.
It Delivers
With well-directed and well-injected automation in this area, a service or software can be endowed with:
- Effective release outcomes
- Production-like environment
- Inimitable competitiveness in the marketplace
- Quality-related relief for software requirements
- Super-fast cycles
- Palpable reduction in GTM (Go-to-Market) windows
- Continuous delivery advantages
- Cognizance of feedback loops
- Success with comprehensive requirement-validation
- Substantial testing-related time-savings
- Simultaneous development, integration, testing and deployment of code
Doing it Right
To make sure that automation is wielded the right way in the case of acceptance testing, an organisation would have to comprehend and strategically handle these tests within the CICD process. If a team is able to handle development and maintenance of test suites with reasonable effectiveness and efficiency; the outcomes intended for this process would come by easily and would stay.
Strong understanding of Governance, Principles and Practices would usher in the precision and speed that one is aiming for. This would entail room for aspects like positive and negative testing, sharp scenario-planning, production-relevant features, run-time acceleration; readiness for test-breakdowns; as well as a timely confrontation of dependencies and complexity that can pop without warning.
Ascertaining relevance, complexity-levels, regression-scope and degree of risk would make these tests more actionable and profitable. Alignment of test goals with constraints also helps immensely in making this stage productive and wrinkle-free.
Decouple Deployment & Release
With sufficient clarity, planning, documentation, tooling and collaboration, acceptance testing can be leveraged in a new way with automation — thus, helping organisations survive and conquer brisk and blunt expectations of today’s business. That too, at a lightning speed.
