Traditional vs Agile Testing

Traditional Testing

With Waterfall model, testing tends to happen towards the end of the project life cycle so defects are detected close to the live implementation date. 

The V-model was developed to address some of the problems experienced using the traditional waterfall approach. The V-model provides guidance that testing needs to begin as early as possible in the life cycle, which is one of the fundamental principles of structured testing. There are a variety of activities that need to be performed before the end of the coding phase. These activities should be carried out in parallel with development activities, and testers need to work with developers and business analysts so they can perform these activities and tasks and produce a set of test deliverables. By starting test design early, defects are often found in the test basis documents.

Agile Testing

• It promotes the generation of business stories to define the functionality.
• It demands an on-site customer for continual feedback and to define and carry out functional acceptance testing.
• It promotes pair programming and shared code ownership amongst the developers.
• It states that component test scripts shall be written before the code is written and that those tests should be automated.
• It states that integration and testing of the code shall happen several times a day.
• It states that we always implement the simplest solution to meet today's problems

Agile testing with its focus on business value and delivering the quality customers require, is different from traditional testing which focuses on conformance to requirements.