Even though jumping onto the agile bandwagon is tempting for businesses, it is not always easy, and a transition to agile is likely to come with a slew of challenges for testing in particular. In order for agile to enable delivery of quality products at speed, testing has to begin much earlier in the process than ever before. Enabling certain practices will help your organization achieve a more successful transition to agile testing.

With traditional software development methods, you are betting that end-of-lifecycle testing will let your team correct all risks, but experience has taught us that this seldom happens. With agile, you are incrementally reducing risk with every iteration and release you do, mitigating risks as you go. This article examines each of the value statements from the Agile Manifesto to illustrate how agile ultimately helps us reduce product risk.

Consider how your team currently organizes: for resource efficiency, optimizing for the individual; or for flow efficiency, optimizing for the team? Successful agile teams—distributed or not—should collaborate to optimize the flow of work through the team. This approach lets you understand your capacity, learn together, and deliver more effectively.

New agile teams often start projects after some brief training on the Agile Manifesto and agile frameworks. But without additional coaching, these teams will struggle to deliver continuous value to their clients. Teams should be coached on how to tackle unexpected Situations, use appropriate Tools, conduct agile Events, and adopt appropriate agile Practices—four agile STEPs.