How ARD Helps DevOps Realize Its Full Potential

Around two decades ago, organizations began turning to agile methodologies like Scrum, Kanban, and Lean in a bid to improve their development processes and deliver better software products faster. The advent of agile approaches has indeed proved to be a boon for software teams as they respond to the changing needs of projects and stakeholders.

To ensure they satisfy quality and usability expectations, apps must go through a rigorous testing process. Here’s where organizations often struggle with test maintenance. Whenever changes occur, they must scramble to revisit the test cases and fix them manually, which adds cost and complexity to the process. This is where a model testing tool like Agile Requirements Designer (ARD) from Broadcom dramatically streamlines the process and ultimately helps teams produce better software.

The case for automation

The manual approach to the coding development and testing process isn’t only less efficient—introducing cost and complexity—but also introduces avoidable errors. Course correcting to eliminate manual processes thus becomes key to simplifying engineering and maintaining requirement traceability. Customers deploying ARD’s model-based testing have broken that logjam. They’re using this powerful tool to create, manage, and automate their test cases—and doing so with less cost, effort, and maintenance.

Surmounting obstacles

Development organizations start off with the need to understand what kind of code will get written and what testing needs to be done. This requirement phase is fundamental to a product’s ultimate success because development teams must understand what the product owner (and product management) wants.

Testing requirements are frequently updated, so test setups must be flexible. Here’s where ARD supplies the necessary functionality and flexibility customers need to deliver fully tested software on time and on budget, even when requirements are constantly changing. Users can map existing requirements to a flowchart model so that test teams quickly understand any new requirements. The model is sufficiently flexible so that tests can be automatically updated with the flowchart, offering a single point of reference for business and IT. Test teams immediately understand any changes made to the requirements. Once optimal test cases are generated, it takes only a few days to execute them and release fully tested software on time, with no incidents.

Shift left

Customers want to be sure that whatever product they are developing is thoroughly tested, with the goal of ensuring that the product is ready and available for end users. In the shift-left testing process, you don't want to wait for anybody to write your test cases or design your test data or code. With ARD, if you have a requirement, you design the model and test data is available on day one of development. Whenever you have an idea or are doing requirement gathering, the ARD platform helps analyze whether something got missed during the manual or automated process, offering up possible scenarios.

Time savings

This model-based approach streamlines the process and requires fewer people. It also includes a scriptless approach that opens the process up to the participation of testers who may not know how to code. ARD also cuts regression testing timelines after any changes get made to requirements, thus allowing participants to immediately focus on tests that need to be redone, rather than repeating them all. The upshot: higher quality apps in a shorter timeframe, with customers benefiting from the improved efficiency and accuracy of ARD’s testing processes.

Reducing human error

ARD maintains requirement traceability through the entire development and testing life cycle. Its model-based testing approach automates the design, development, and maintenance of executable test cases.  
When organizations have a requirement, they don't need manual test cases or data checks. Instead, they create a model that automatically generates the test case. That also has the further benefit of eliminating possible human error cropping up somewhere along the line.

Stakeholder collaboration

ARD allows stakeholders to easily share information and track progress with a central repository of requirements and test cases. Stakeholders no longer need to separately negotiate with product owners, developers, and testers about the proper amount of testing. Both business analysts and testers work from the same flow charts, with ARD automatically generating test cases and scripts to shorten review cycles.

Better testing, better software

Anybody who is doing development or adding new features to a product wants to be confident about their latest product release. The last thing they want is to release an app and then pull it back because of shortcomings. It used to take weeks of effort to write out those test cases to determine whether a particular scenario would fail. ARD automates it all and never misses a possible scenario. Automating tasks involved in test case design, development, and maintenance further reduces the risk of defects. Diagramming a model based on possible scenarios that might come out of a user story or requirement, nobody needs to sit down and write out the steps involved for manual testing. ARD automatically ensures all possible scenarios will be tested.

Ultimately, all of this contributes to improving confidence in the quality of software development.  

Conclusion

There are no shortcuts in product development, but with ARD, development teams are deploying a powerful tool that leads to better outcomes. By integrating ARD into their existing automation framework, organizations can create and maintain automation scripts as part of generating their test cases. The result: they no longer need to struggle with test maintenance, and they improve the quality of their applications through the automation of their testing process.

To learn more, watch this video on DevOps best practices and ARD.