In their SAFe case study video, Tricentis make the critical point that although testing is a key component it’s not actually covered in too much detail within the framework.
Tricentis begin the presentation with a set of very important insights. SAFe is part of a trend to adopt the latest ‘cool’ Agile practices but for large enterprises making this shift if they’re not careful when doing so they can incur a number of painful organizational costs, from losing key skills baked into their previous waterfall team structures as they are diffused across new teams, and losing a long term strategic focus as short term delivery becomes the goal.
In particular traceability and measurement becomes an issue as multiple teams become autonomous and there is no central ownership, so identifying and tracking defects can be a challenge. To address this they recommend a testing leader who spans all the workstreams and to centralise and make testing a prioritised feature of managing the streams.
From 10:45 they explain how to bring all this together into a single holistic framework as they did so for one client, to achieve an integrated end-to-end approach for testing. Using the main tools of QTest and Tosca they’ve achieved a highly efficient, fully automated system. Defects are delivered directly back to the developers, the tools are integrated with their CI/CD pipeline so that automation is triggered as part of their development workflows, and all the data is rolled up to a central dashboard for a single source of truth reporting.
