Adopt an economic view

Description

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The first principle that SAFe adopts is the economic vision in its organisation [SAFe 2021-1]. This principle does not only concern the estimation of budgets, but also the whole chain of solution delivery and exploitation, notably by deploying as early and often as possible, which is the basis of a Lean/Agile/DevOps organisation in order to limit budgetary drift. Indeed, the longer a release waits, the more :

• the organisation delays the moment when it will postpone the moment when the new features can make money for itself or its customers [Reinertsen 2009].
• the planned budget and the actual cost drift

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Also, an economic view comes to depend [SAFe 2021-1] of :

• the delays introduced by the processes
• the manufacturing costs of the product
• the added value delivered
• development costs
• the technical and business risks associated with the product

Application to test maturity

Google introduces in its vision of DevOps the notion of "error budget" [Beyer 2016] which takes into consideration a certain economic vision linked to the release of a low quality release and the test helps to estimate the cost linked to non-quality.

Indeed, testing is first and foremost feedback and the earliest possible release contributes to the implementation of the ISTQB principle "test early" [Radid 2018].

Indeed, the earlier we have feedback, the less easy it is to find bugs and the more expensive it is to fix them.

Furthermore, test automation helps to reduce the cost of each batch to be delivered, especially on regression tests, and limits the costs inherent in non-quality by their systematic presence. This last point is however limited by two factors :

• the maintenance of scripts in the event of changes to the interface to be tested
• the number of false positives generated by the scripts [Philipp 2018] [Moustier 2020].

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Agilitest's position on this practice

Agilitest is a simple tool to learn and reduces the costs associated with the learning curve found in traditional tools such as Selenium that require strong programming knowledge beforehand [Chevalier 2019].

The scripts are #nocode [Forsyth 2021] and therefore devoid of the loops found in programming languages, although it allows iteration on a csv or json file. This simplicity of the scripts is intended to limit the maintenance costs of complex scripts [Hannachi 2019], as the course of a scenario is linear.

The editor has specific functionalities which reduce and help the maintenance activities, such as video reports of step by step running.

The ATS running engine supports many technologies and has been built in order to avoid flaky tests, hence allowing the customer to run a large amount of tests (in general Agilitest customers have more than 1000 tests that they run every night or release).

Moreover, unlike many automation frameworks, only the editor is paid for, whereas the engine is available in open source (ATS) and the scripts can be edited with a simple text editor. This means that Agilitest's clients are not locked into the platform and do not lose the legacy of scripts developed under Agilitest.

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To discover the whole set of practices, click here.

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