From Home to Prod: 6 Remote Testing Best Practices from Agile Teams

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people to work from home and spend more time online, leading to a surge in software usage. This has been an opportunity for businesses that have transitioned to digital, with telemedicine seeing 6X higher impression volume than before the lockdowns, mobile e-commerce ad spend up 34%, mobile news consumption up 11x, and app installs increasing by 5% on Google Play and 15% on the iOS App Store. Software companies have seen their shares prove more resilient than the overall stock market during this time. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of delivering quality software, which requires continuous, automated testing. Some best practices for automated testing include finding and fixing flaky tests, shortening review cycles by doing a bulk of testing before code review, using device-level retries to avoid full test build restarts, adopting a risk-based approach to testing, informing feedback loops with data, and maintaining production sanity.