Benefits of E2E Test Automation & Continuous Testing (Part 6: to Happy Customers)

Boost the customer’s confidence

Continuous Testing (enables software teams to release to production daily, not fake CI/CD talks. Check out “Continuous Integration at Facebook” and AgileWay Continuous Testing Grading) is the heart of the software development process. It benefits all stakeholders of a software project.

• Executives
• Managers
• Business Analysts
• Developers
• Testers (automated & manual)
• Customers

“On-site Customer” is one of the agile practices. However, this practice seemed to have been largely forgotten in recent years. Besides human factors, I think the main reasons are:

• low development productivity
  It is not practical to ask an on-site customer to wait 9 working days (a typical sprint length is 2 weeks) to see some new features implemented. Customers shall be able to try out the application and provide feedback quickly and frequently.

By the way, the 2-week sprint, in my opinion, is too long. I recommend 2 sprints per week; if CT is implemented, it is really not that hard to achieve it.

• poor software quality
  When a software team lacks a good automated regression testing process, they will encounter unexpected defects often. Under these circumstances, project managers will naturally want to hide the product from the customers and ignore the ‘on-site customer practice.’

The customers only care about the product. Imagine you are a customer representative who is assigned to work with the software team. You take time out of your normal work to attend many meetings that talk about story points, velocity and burn charts in JIRA. Understandably, you, as well as most on-site customers, would be pissed off with those non-sense so-called “agile ceremonies”.

Agile is all about feedback, the agile practices only make sense if the customers get to use the software product to try out new features quickly. Of course, the major challenge is to to introduce regression errors. That’s why test automation and Continuous Testing are the foundation of Agile. While most agile…