Introduction to End-to-End Testing

When I started my career as a software tester, we were following V – model which is an enhancement of the waterfall model. It was introduced due to several reasons. In this article, we are going to analyse if early end-to-end testing is a better approach or not.

Early end-to-end testing has some dependencies and advantages. Let’s discuss them by one by one in detail.

End to End Testing Dependencies:

1. Well documented business process: When we know clearly about the processes to follow, early end to end testing can be planned accordingly. Processes could include the type of test environment to use, business flows, deadlines, requirements and testers etc. Business analysts are responsible for such documents. When these supporting documents are available, it is easier for the testing team to get involved in the early test planning and strategies. Testing team can prepare the required test cases and found the defects within the documented scenarios based on their experience level.
2. Proper test environment: Proper test environment to carry out early end to end testing, setting up proper test environment is crucial. Not only this will give correct results but also, helps in getting the right defects. When the test environment is proper, the new testing team member may have the ample time to learn and operate on this environment. If a tester has the better understanding of the environment, then it will fetch the positive outcome towards the testing result which will be composed of right defects and hence an effort in the right direction.
3. Well formulated test cases: on the basis of the requirements, end to end test cases should be written in such a way that they can be understood and executed by any testers without gaps or misunderstandings. If testing team is provided with the concrete documents of the project, then it becomes easier for them to carve the appropriate test cases with the maximum test coverage.
4. Availability of test data: Getting correct results largely depends on the correct test data. Different test cases could require different set of test data which can be generated in advance to help in early end to end testing. Test data should be equivalent to the production data so that testing team is performing testing on the proper data set which will fetch the correct defects and positive testing outcome.
5. Availability of resources: testing team has multiple responsibilities from testing the requirements to design test plan and creating test cases. Early end to end testing is not necessarily carry out by testing team but can be done by business users as well. It is important to have proper resources to help with end to end testing. Always, a tester or the end user with appropriate testing skills that suites the project is desired for testing any software application as the testing experience matters a lot. Based on the experience of tester, the productivity in the end to end testing can be observed.

Advantages of End to End Testing:

1. Reduces Cost and Saves Money: We all know that fixing a defect at the later stage costs much more than fixing it early. Early end to end testing helps in finding defects in early stages of software lifecycle which saves a lot of money and reduces overall project cost.
2. Less Effort: Early end to end testing is a win-win situation where fixing the early bugs are easy for developers and also, it is less work for testers at the later stages. For example, we have 40 test cases in end to end flows to test. We know these are the most important flows to test, we can invest some time to automated those and make them as regression suite which will save time and efforts both. In other words, we can say that it will be an effort in the right direction.
3. Time Management: Early end to end testing helps in managing the deadlines by giving more time to do detailed testing. If end to end testing is carried out by business users then testers will have more time to carry out functional, performance or integration testing. They will have more time to plan other test activities. Provided tester are given an appropriate time to test, then they may spent effort in implementing advanced testing techniques on top of the traditional testing approaches.
4. Better integration testing: The main advantage of early end to end testing is improved integration testing. End to end testing will have all the major end to end flows which will be integrated with the system, when we carry out early testing, we will be in a better position to see how integration is working for us and what needs to be improved. It provides a glimpse of the complete integrated system testing.
5. Improved requirement and quality: This is an obvious advantage of early end to end testing. When we start testing early, we test requirements too which will give us all the gaps and defects and hence, it will help us to improvise requirements and overall quality of the product. Quality documentation results in quality product development which could only be approved by the Quality Analyst team.
6. Better functional understanding: If early end to end testing is carried out by the business users, they will get a better understanding of the software and how to use it properly. This will save sometime in training them later and also, there will be less confusion at the time of software launch in the market.

Conclusion

In this article, we discussed about some of the dependencies and the advantages of the end to end testing. In software industry, most of the time the testing team faces the time crunch to test the software but an early end to end testing a better approach to mitigate such situations in the software industry in order to fetch the maximum testing outcome.