In the current environment where speed of release time is accentuated and there is pressure to frequently release value to end users, many organizations are realizing that agile testing can help fully integrate quality into the development and delivery process. However, this is not always easy for organizations to achieve on their own and Coveros has the expertise and processes to help get them across the finish line.
At Coveros, we are experienced in helping to identify and knock down the walls between software developers and testers through a combination of agile practices and pragmatic test automation. We’d love an opportunity to show you how we can improve your current testing efforts (and thus your software) using time-proven methods.
While coaching is part of every testing engagement we engage in, some organizations choose to focus their improvement efforts on coaching in lieu of a more formal “assessment, build, deploy” process. At Coveros, we provide a variety of coaching capabilities to help your organization improve, including:
- Enterprise software testing: These coaches educate executives and senior leadership on testing principles and hold value stream analysis workshops with business leaders.
- Agile testing: Our agile testing coaches work with the entire Scrum team on processes to ensure a standard definition of done, outline how work needs to get completed to facilitate testing, and define what quality means and how it affects each team member.
- Technical test automation: These experienced coaches are focused on helping test engineers successfully write automated tests and integrate them into DevOps pipelines.
We might call it coaching, but Coveros coaches do more than facilitate. We are believers that your staff learns best by doing alongside others who have done it before and can model proper behavior. Our coach practitioners pair with and mentor your staff to accelerate their improvement.
Regardless of the mix of coaching and consulting your organization needs, Coveros can create a customized plan based on your specific situation and level of testing maturity. Our goal is to help facilitate the improvement of your software’s quality as well as your team’s efficiency no matter your level of agile and/or DevOps sophistication.
Test Process Assessment
Coveros will assess your organization’s current processes against our Agile Testing Process Improvement model to determine your capabilities and competencies. This model has helped a wide range of companies build, test, secure, and even deploy software applications using agile methods and automation, and it helps identify and prioritize areas for improvement.
Our improvement model evaluates your organization against a range of criteria, including process, strategy, training, defect tracking, tooling, metrics, communication, and reporting and benchmarks your maturity against others like you. The outcome of a test process assessment is an improvement roadmap to help guide your test process improvement activities. The improvements we recommend are prioritized by need and return-on-investment so you can be confident that efforts made to improve your testing process will result in additional business value.
Find out more here.
Agile Testing Practices
Coveros will help your organization adopt agile testing principles and practices. This means that testing becomes a part of every user story, and a story is not considered done until all story-level tests have been written and successfully executed, including unit, smoke, acceptance, and functional and nonfunctional tests.
We will work with your development team to improve the quality of your unit tests, while introducing them to concepts such as test-driven development (TDD), which ensures that every new feature developed begins with writing a test. We can also help non-technical stakeholders participate in specifying how an application should behave functionally by introducing behavior-driven development (BDD) tools.
While some organizations advocate an “automate everything” methodology, Coveros will help your organization find the right balance between manual and automated testing. Using the MoSCoW method—an acronym for the four prioritization categories, “Must have,” “Should have,” “Could have,” and “Won’t have”—we will help identify what to automate and what to leave as a manual test, and assist with integrating this into your test plan. Our strong experience and expertise in exploratory testing will help your testing team improve their manual testing skills and complement the automation you create.
While we can help organizations at any point along the test automation maturity spectrum, we have a proven process for taking an organization with nonexistent or poor automation and starting them on the path to reaching full agile testing maturity. Depending on the team makeup, Coveros can work either independently or hand in hand with existing teams to design, develop, and implement the testing frameworks needed to be successful in allowing automation to integrate into the agile testing process.
Find out more here.
Test Automation
Coveros will work with your team to create an environment where everyone participates in testing the application. We will set up test frameworks and implement example test cases to enable your team to start writing tests with minimal overhead while following best practices. This may include determining whether BDD would help bridge some automation gaps within the organization. Test setup and required or dependent data will be examined and included to ensure an optimized testing implementation. We also will set up local and testing environments to ensure ease of running tests and onboarding future testers. Because this entire process includes the current testing team, minimal additional training is needed, which ensures a smooth handoff.
Coveros will ensure the tests being written are the most appropriate for your organization and will work with the team to get full support. These tests may include functional tests (e.g., usability, smoke, and regression), non-functional tests (e.g., performance, security, and compliance), and end-to-end tests. Lower-level testing may also be included, such as appropriate unit tests and an examination of desired code coverage. In addition, we will review development practices to see if TDD and mutation testing could help improve test and code quality.
Continuous Testing
We often hear from clients that one of the more difficult challenges facing quality teams and organizations today is integrating their automated testing solutions into their DevOps environment or CI/CD pipeline. At Coveros, not only do we have test automation expertise, but each of our consultants also holds a Foundations of DevOps Engineering certification from the ICAgile. Our deep understanding and experience with DevOps gives our consultants an informed perspective on how and where automated testing fits into an organization’s DevOps pipeline.
Leveraging this knowledge and experience, Coveros test engineers will identify quality metrics to evaluate the application at all levels: code coverage, open CVEs (common vulnerabilities and exposures) on dependencies, and functional testing goals. They will then integrate these metrics with the corresponding tests to provide quality thresholds at all levels of testing, enabling continuous feedback on the quality of the application. By focusing on desired quality thresholds, Coveros can help ensure that the correct metrics are identified for pass/fail criteria.
Along with integrating tests into the pipeline, our consultants are also able to foresee and avoid common pitfalls that cause automated tests to be unreliable in a DevOps pipeline. Automated testing in your DevOps pipeline is vital to ensure quality software at all stages of development. Utilizing their expertise in the DevOps space, Coveros engineers will ensure the correct tests run at each development stage in your pipeline to provide the most accurate and prompt feedback possible.
Security Testing
Unfortunately for many organizations, security is an afterthought—it only becomes a concern once there is a security breach, by which time it is already too late to make the application secure. At Coveros, we include security testing as part of the initial test planning and our agile testing process to ensure that security is built into the application continuously, from design to development to deployment.
During the software design phase, we begin by ensuring that best practices are followed for application architecture and that requirements include nonfunctional ones relating to security. Security testing is incorporated into your lightweight agile testing test plans to verify both your functional security requirements and perform adequate risk-based testing against any existing threat models.
At Coveros, our security testing experience includes both manual and automated analysis of applications across the full spectrum of possible vulnerabilities. Some of the many security testing services we offer include:
- Risk-based security testing: Assures identified threats and risks are not able to compromise your systems or access sensitive customer data.
- Security testing of controls: Guarantees all integrated security controls (e.g., authentication, authorization, and logging) have been securely integrated.
- Validation of open source libraries: Validates that existing open source frameworks and libraries have no known vulnerabilities.
- System security testing: Tests associated networks, platforms, and third-party integrations to assure the application is secure within its environment.
Agile Testing QuickStarts
For those organizations seeking to leverage test automation technology they have invested in or want to get rolling with automation very quickly, Coveros has developed a series of Agile Testing QuickStarts to get you rolling. Call us for more information on how to get started with one of these packages:
Selenified QuickStart – The Selenified QuickStart program allows those organizations who struggle with test automation to fully realize the benefits of Selenified™, a Coveros developed open source testing framework. Selenified provides mechanisms for testing applications at multiple tiers while easily integrating into DevOps build environments. It also provides traceable reporting for web and API testing, wraps Selenium calls to more appropriately handle testing errors, and supports testing over multiple browsers, locally or in the cloud, in parallel. It can be a great starting point for building or improving test automation in your organization. Explore more details about more about the two week Selenified Quick Start program.
SpiraTest Automation QuickStart – The SpiraTest Automation QuickStart helps organization successful get started using Inflectra’s SpiraTest testing products. SpiraTest is a complete quality assurance (QA) and test management solution that, when coupled with Rapise, provides full lifecycle automated testing for web, mobile, and desktop systems. This two week QuickStart includes consulting support to effectively integrate SpiraTest into your testing process and starting doing test automation. Explore more details about the SpiraTest QuickStart program.
Case Studies
Learn more about our real-world agile testing and test automation work:
Coveros Improves Software Testing & Management Practices for Global Financial Services Organization
Coveros Automates Testing to Expand Test Coverage and Support Legacy Systems
Coveros Increases Software Quality with Automated Functional and Security Testing
Coveros Implements Test Automation at PECOS 2.0
Coveros Automates Testing to Ensure Quality in a Startup’s New Application