Month: January 2019

Let’s take a real-life scenario from one of our banking customers. Their web banking application has an upcoming release which has a combination of bug fixes, enhancements, and certain API changes. Since it’s a fairly mature application, it has a repository of test assets with approximately 1000 manual test cases and 200 automation scripts. These assets are part of an ALM tool repository. These test assets in the past were tied to requirements, managed in a separate tool, however, during the years and multiple releases, the requirements traceability does not exist anymore.

Test planning is kicked off, and it’s time to figure out what Test Cases are impacted in manual and automation assets. And remember in reality these test assets do not trace to Requirements.

I’m positive this situation will sound familiar to you. Change Impact is a completely manual process today which is time-consuming and error-prone. Not to mention, test cases that are not relevant, never get deleted to avoid the risk. This has a snowball effect and your test case repository is ever expanding, giving you a false perception of quality. The higher count of test case does not relate to better coverage or higher quality. In reality, Test case count with the manual process of Change Management is misleading, and most of the effort in “maintaining” this repository is going down the drain.

Normally Test suites are manually created based on this change impact analysis. In most cases we over-test, just to be sure we lower our risk.

Adopting true Agility would mean bringing efficiency and automating this critical change management process.

Enter the era of accelQ Universe with Change-Bots

accelQ approaches this uniquely at both test case scenario level as well as at automation script level. I talk about script level change management in another post. accelQ’s App universe concept bakes in the modularity and creates test scenarios that directly relate to components of application and business process. The relationships between these components are a real and direct representation of the application, its business rules and the end-to-end flow including API calls. This referential integrity is the core of bringing automation to the change management process. accelQ’s change bots are able to do real-time path analysis for any business process change to exactly nail down what scenarios are impacted. Not just that, the exact step within each impacted test case is identified reducing the change management effort by 40%. And you can propagate this business process change across all your test assets knowing exactly the impact, allowing you to change logic with precision.

The fourth industrial revolution is here and we are on the cusp of the technological revolution that will change how we live, work, and communicate. The change brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution has been impacting many sectors. Not leaving a stone unturned, the impact has spearheaded in reshaping government, education, healthcare, and commerce.

The technological advancements over the years have ushered in new-age players who act as game-changers continuously challenging and disrupting the traditional methods. These emerging technological trends stand as the “Fantastic Four” in today’s digitally equipped world and they are artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, Blockchain technology, and Bigdata.

Artificial Intelligence

One would not be surprised to know that Artificial Intelligence is deployed all around us today. Yes, the AI boom is happening very quickly all around the world and it is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. This is because of the progress it has made in certain fields which have resulted in the adoption of artificially intelligent offerings. AI is now used in hearing aids to filter out ambient noise and navigation apps to guide you through the city traffic. It helps doctors in diagnosing diseases, detecting tumors, recommends treatment plans and interprets electrocardiograms. AI will continue to scale into different verticals from manufacturing to education, retail to health care in the years to come. Previously, what was considered as the next big challenge for AI is now considered a generic software. All hail AI.

The IoT

The Internet of Things is here to change the world and is no more hype. IoT which has been the best definition of “connected world” of ours, has made it easier to track, analyze and bring out new inventions like never before. The applications of it almost everywhere starting with a smartwatch that you own to the autonomous car. It may be mentioned that recently, an unmanned Audi A7 drove for more than 550 miles between San Francisco and Las Vegas. The brain for the drive was NVIDIA processors! By 2020, Gartner Research suggests that 20% of the vehicles on our roads would be giving off information to a central database via some kind of wireless connection. Sierra Wireless is already in function for manufacturers like Toyota, Volvo, Tesla, BMW, and Ford.

Blockchain Technology

“An incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.” The blockchain is the current vibe that is accelerating a breakthrough in the applications. With its reliance on public key encryption, blockchain has a much stronger defense mechanism than other approaches. The globe has already witnessed an extensive adoption of the disruptive technology for an uplifting competitive advantage. According to a World Economic Forum Survey conducted two years ago, it was predicted that 10% of global GDP would be stored with blockchain technology by 2027. The blockchain technology, also described as the “internet of value”, has caught many by surprise by the ending of 2017 and became the emerging distributed ledger technology. The innovation in the decentralized ecosystem which has the potential to automate not just key processes but entire industries is not just limited to cryptocurrency.

Big Data

The term “Big Data” is currently the buzzword that has been gaining much hype in the recent years. Organizations and brands in almost every industry are using big data to break new ground. Data is the most valued asset today and organizations rely more on the data to keep their business momentum accelerated. Starting with the basic information like the products available in the market, the demand, pricing, success rate, organizations depend majorly on the right data for business decisions. Big data is the backbone of groundbreaking scientific and medical research, bringing the ability to analyze and study at a rate never before available. And it impacts how we live each day.

The world is increasingly becoming more and more demanding, especially when it comes to Technology where immense competition is not only thirsty of innovations but also brutally greedy when it comes to Return on Investments (ROI).

All the visionaries at top benches of organizations are constantly looking for innovative solutions for their customers. The techies and coders across the spheres are thus finding it hard to cope with increasing the pressure of devising ground-breaking solutions that are not only cost-effective, scalable but also reusable across business lines.

Pyramid Consulting Solutions is no-where far when it comes to building reusable solutions. As part of its Technology Forum initiative, ‘Reusable Components’ were launched in February 2019, for Pyramid Software Delivery Team.

This is a unique platform where innovative Pyramidions have shared frameworks, code base and libraries with all the associated documentation, instructions and test cases, that will enable and promote the culture of both contributing as well as adopting re-usable components in cutting edge technologies like .NET, Angular, JAVA to name a few. This will not only save a lot of time and effort in usual day-to-day coding but will also acquaint the technology staff with flexible and pioneering ‘ready to use’ solutions that can be used directly or with minimal tweaking.

The obvious benefits of building such standardized components viz:

Reusability: Adoption of an already developed, thoroughly tested and the documented module brings Efficiency in Delivery Time and Delivery Quality;

Standardization: Usage of standardized & approved components across projects ensure adherence to Quality Standards across the organization;

Innovation: These Reusable components provide a (code) baseline which can be either used as-is or could be enhanced up to any level to achieve desired results;

Knowledge – Widespread usage and understanding of Reusable components paves way for dissemination of knowledge across individuals, teams, and verticals within the organization;

shall not only help to reach closer to organization’s technology goals but shall also imbibe a sense of collaboration and forward thinking, while designing or adopting a readymade solution.
These reusable components are thoroughly tested, are well documented that includes both open sources as well as Pyramid’s proprietary stand-alone modules that are maintained and upgraded regularly to catch up with current market trends in terms of technology and demand.

Well defined guidelines have been laid down for both adapters as well as developers of these Reusable components to adhere to industry and organization standards. Some of the prominent Reusable components that have already taken shape and are available for use include- data upload and display into the grid, caching of frequently used data to avoid network roundtrip from database and user authentication from LDAP with group consideration.
Not to mention, this is just the start of a long inventive learning curve that will get its pace going, with participation and contribution from everyone associated with technology world.

Author Bio:

Mayank Singh is Operations Lead in Pyramid IT Consulting, NOIDA.
He is an engineering graduate and holds master’s degree in Management with over 11 years of industry experience and contributes to blogs and articles to the community.

At Pyramid, we have quality standards and take utmost care to do thorough testing of code by the development team. This approach includes doing manual testing, coded unit testing and code coverage. Our approach to code testing is usually a mix of both Unit Testing and Behavior Testing. In Unit Testing we test the code statements that we write and with Behavior Testing we test the scenarios of the feature that we implement. We can write a Test Case before writing the code or after writing the code and that depends on what the stakeholders have agreed upon. Writing unit tests first and implementing the code to pass the tests is known as TDD (Test Driven Development). Similarly writing the acceptance test cases first followed by implementation is known as ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development). Driving the implementation by writing Behavior Test is known as BDD (Behavior Driven Development).

Writing TDD or BDD is a part of our delivery best practices. We believe that “code not tested is not done” and therefore we also ensure we test the code we write. Agile developments are incomplete without unit test and code coverage.
“Code not tested is not done”

Along with the coding guidelines we publish unit testing guidelines for developers. Recurring Tech Talks and Trainings are organized for such best practices. During our regular audit cycle , we review the “code coverage” report and quality of the unit test cases written based on our published unit test guidelines. Whenever there is a smell or coverage is below the benchmark defined in project plan, it is escalated to the Quality Control Board so that necessary corrective action is taken in time. Full cooperation from all stakeholders is required to make it success otherwise it is moved towards lower priority.

Whether we write unit test cases or we write behavior test cases, code coverage is always generated and reviewed. It is up to the stakeholders to choose which approach to be followed. TDD or BDD? I have experienced that if it is a TDD then business stakeholders have little or no interest in it because it doesn’t give any business value. If it is BDD then business sees some values as they can see the acceptance test cases are automated but it doesn’t test the code written by the developer. Some stakeholders choose not to have unit test cases but that is a different case and they pay the price post-production.

To provide value to both business and developer, we follow the fusion of TDD and BDD. One major guideline for implementing the BDD flavor in unit testing is to name the test methods with scenarios. Example is below:
A unit test name: “TestCalculateHouseRentAllowance”
A recommended unit test name that express the behavior. It gives a BDD flavour: “TestCalculateHouseRentAllowance_BasicSalary3HundredThousandThenHRAshouldBe50K”

Inside the test method, we write test cases to cover the codes and branches. Also we ensure the acceptance test criteria are passed. If stakeholders are happy to bring in BDD frameworks like Gherkin and Cucumber SpecFlow, we easily integrate it .NET and nUnit or MsTest. Practice remains almost same. We do the same for Java. Our QA Test Automation sometimes follows the option of integrating Gherkin BDD approach with Selenium WebDriver to automate frontend testing.

Below is a BDD expression written in Gherkin language:
Scenario: Calculate House Rent Allowance for Salary Greater or Equal One Million
Given Basic Salary is “300,000”
When Calculate HRA
Then The calculated HRA should be “50,000”

Our expertized TDD frameworks are nUnit, jUnit, MsTest, Visual Studio Test. Our expertized BDD frameworks are Gherkin, Cucumber Specflow, Jasmine, Karma and Protractor. We undergo unit test coding for almost all .NET based technologies, Java based applications, Ruby, PHP, Angular, Vue.js, React.js, etc. We integrate these frameworks and unit test execution inside CI (continuous integration) pipeline. Technologies that we have covered with BDD are C#, WCF Services, Web API, Angular, Vue.js, React.js, JavaScript, Java.

We have come across a long journey of TDD and BDD, challenges in implementation, complexities of adopting it in existing applications. When automation are at all not in favor, we do manual unit test execution.

Author Bio:

Chingangbam Irabanta is Chief Architect in Pyramid IT Consulting, NOIDA.
He contributes blogs and articles to the community. He holds a master’s degree in computer application and have over 16 years of industry experience.