The Software testing community experienced an exciting year of 2017 with many trends taking shape. Applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, continuing trend in adoption of DevOps, increasing test automation, shortening release schedules, and the lack of time for testing. The prevailing state of software testing is getting more challenging with every day passing. With the huge demand for high-quality products within a short time span, the role of testing has grown beyond just another process. Not a single software product could be released without its quality testing and bug fixing. The Software testing industry is always evolving and transforming to new horizons that’s why it’s better to forecast and predict such trends ahead of everyone. This article makes bold predictions for Software Testing trends of 2021.
It’s essential for the software development and testing firms to know about the latest Software Testing trends of 2021 to achieve the expected quality. The strategies and methodologies of software testing and test management tools are in a continuous shift. The rapid technological advancements drive the testers to upgrade their skills periodically. So, here are the Top 14 Emerging Software Testing Trends of 2021 that you should pay attention to this year.
Digital Transformation is disrupting the way software applications are being developed, amplifying the need for building better software testing capabilities. The patterns, methodologies, and tools for testing have evolved with the changing software testing needs.
1. Continuing Test Automation
Test automation is a hot keyword today, seen as the main approach to shortening the testing and delivery time. The complexities with applications and software are increasing and there is a growing need for continuous software testing, which might reach a dead point if automation is not implemented. Test Automation can bring consistency and velocity to the testing activity. Major open-source and free tools such as Selenium and Katalon and commercial tools as Ranorex and TestComplete now support integration with many DevOps tool-chains like Jenkins, GIT, and JIRA. While being an enabler, it might be a challenge for testers to adopt the right strategy for test automation. It will be necessary to understand and harness skills in test automation.
2. Mobile Test Automation
Mobile Testing allows you to test an apps functionality, consistency, usability and also enhance the growth of user base. Mobile App testing greatly differs from traditional desktop testing due to its complexity and new challenges. The utilization of Test automation in software projects is now at a low level. For Mobile Test automation, it is even lower.
There is a current lack of right methods, tools, and devices to perform automated testing of mobile applications. The number of mobile devices is expected to grow tremendously in the nearest future. Various gadgets became the primary method of communication for both clients and businesses, which leads to thousands of apps being made each day — for cars, wearables, and smart homes. The increasing shift away from desktop and web towards mobile applications along with ever shortening time-to-market requires software organizations to increase the application of test automation for mobile applications. Emerging mobile test platforms and tools such as Kobiton and Sauce Labs may offer advanced and right capabilities to make mobile test automation more executable and affordable.
3. API and Services Test Automation
The main utilization of test automation now focuses on UI testing. A majority of API and services testing is currently performed by developers manually. The trend will be an increasing application of automating API and services testing processes, at a greater pace than automating the UI testing process. Independent testers who are equipped with intelligent and easy-to-use tools will be responsible for API and services testing, helping to reduce time-to-market while improving software quality.
4. Increasing Adoption of Open Source Tools
Get ready because open source tools are going to take over the upcoming year, 2018. Open Source tools, i.e. for which the source code is openly published for use or modifications. It’s already a fact that more and more companies accept Open Source services for the execution of test management and automation. There are several open source tools readily available in the market.
Preference for Open-Source platforms for testing is increasing, which not only brings cost-effectiveness but also brings in a community of experts for support. This has resulted in the adoption of open-source testing platforms such as Selenium. Open source tools are going to rule the software testing industry in the coming years as businesses are going to use them for better performance in terms of Agile, DevOps (development & operations) and Test automation. Testers across projects will have to get accustomed to these platforms to bring speed and quality to the software development process. While this can be perceived as a challenge, open source platforms bring their own strengths to support the testing activity.
In the age of digital transformations, testing is not just a sequential phase but a simultaneous process in the entire development mechanism. As per industry analysis and reports, agile testing and DevOps have been the key drivers for growth in the software testing market. There is an undying need to launch applications at speed and sustain quality at the same time.
5. High-speed Quality
High-quality products in the fastest possible time will be the need of the hour. As a result, businesses will be forced to raise their product standards so that they can deliver the best user experience within the shortest amount of time. This will inevitably be mostly done by more advanced automation. High-quality scripts is on the rise and showing no signs of slowing down.
6. Increasing Adoption of Agile & DevOps
Rapid changes in technologies, platforms, and devices pressure software development teams to develop, test, integrate, and deliver faster and more frequently. Agile and DevOps will be dominating the upcoming year. It offers shorter delivery cycles and dispenses the responsibility of quality to everyone. Continuous delivery and Continuous Integration are the prime components of DevOps and these are responsible for the faster delivery cycles.
DevOps is a set of practices that aim to reduce the time from development (Dev) to operation (Ops) while ensuring the quality of software. DevOps has gained an overwhelming interest over the past five years and the trend is likely to continue in the next few years. DevOps approach requires continuous testing - test automation has to be done on every level. Testers would be verifying the requirements, configuring tool-sets for integration and delivery, creating automation frameworks to support DevOps, etc. It is imperative for testers to adopt agile testing and DevOps skills to ensure velocity, performance, and flexibility in the software development process. Testers will have to develop the required skills and have to break the shell for some fresh tips in software testing. The combination of DevOps and Agile methodologies will become the ultimate source to achieve quality.
These Software Testing Trends of 2018 are equally important for aspiring software testers as well. Earlier, software testers had a relatively easy job, as the skills required were largely limited to the knowledge of testing tools. As technology continues to evolve, specialized testing skills are growing in demand and Tester’s role is about to change a lot. The technological advancements force the QA and testers to improve their skills and quality rhythmically.
7. Demand for SDETs
Though SDETs have been here for a long time, their role was different from that of traditional testing. However, in the years to come, the Test Automation field is going to have a huge demand, due to which more testers will have to take up the role of SDETs to be successful. It means testers might end up developing. Agile approach enables faster turnaround, quicker feedback, and frequent releases. So, the teams are broken up into smaller groups for sprints, where both testers and developers collaborate and ensure that the quality is intact. There are chances that even their roles could get interchanged, so building up those skill-sets is very much important.
8. Python is becoming popular
Python continues to be the first scripting language of choice for testers as it’s easy to learn and much powerful. It can be used in various domains like web development, system operations, scientific modelling, deployment, etc.
9. Performance Engineering
Software Testing Trends of 2018 couldn’t be imagined without this particular latest trend. The success of a website or an app depends on how the design, functionalities, and entities are portrayed to the end user; that is user experience is the prime factor. The demand to provide best UX is leading to the preference of Performance Engineering instead Performance testing to ensure that produced software meets the performance requirements on time. QA testers will migrate from the old strategies and shift from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering.
The Software Testing industry has evolved significantly in the past few years due to the emergence of a new crop of technologies. It is important for companies to incorporate emerging testing methods in their software development life cycle in order to drive growth.
10. Cloud Testing
Testers have now adopted specific approaches to test cloud-based services. Here, real web traffic is used to test the web based apps. It also verifies functions like redundancy and performance scalability.
11. Digital Testing
2018 is ready to witness an era of Digital Transformation. Exposure to digital technologies have made organizations to re-orient their processes, use tools and resources for digital testing that can deliver a much better customer experience. The digital strategy of software organizations must involve optimizing functional testing across all channels.
12. Big Data Testing
Big Data are a collection of large data-sets that cannot be processed using manual computing techniques. Testing of these data-sets involves different tools, techniques and frameworks etc. QA teams need a very strong strategy for Big Data Testing because it requires high-grade analytical tools and frameworks, along with superior techniques and is an area that is expected to grow big in the very near future. In 2018, Testers should equip themselves accordingly to the upcoming developments in Big Data to adapt their testing skills accordingly.
13. Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques have been applied to Software development to improve the productivity of project teams and quality of software. Given recent advancements and growing applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, there will be more intelligent Test automation technologies and tools. These approaches are being used in various processes of the software testing mechanisms like test sequence generation, quantification of quality, automation of testing and checking reliability of the system. They would also bring advancements to formulating test scenarios, predicting application behaviors, and predicting areas and levels of test. Intelligent testing tools will need to offer smart analytics to help better diagnose faults and visualize test results and overall product quality using multi-source data.
14. The Internet of Things Conquest
The Internet of Things technology is becoming the Optimus Prime of all others. Software and applications that connect hardware to the Internet or with each other bring great concerns for the IoT project QA team. In 2018, need for IoT Testing will rise astonishingly. Any IoT product needs to be tested for its functionality, reliability, and effectiveness.
The ubiquitous usage of smartphones, smartwatches, tablets, and other related products is indicating that the need for IoT Testing will come more than ever before. All devices under IoT requires Internet connectivity and, therefore, are vulnerable to security risks. According to a study by HP, 70% of devices in IoT are prone to security risks. It is therefore necessary to perform IoT testing on them.
Conclusion
QA department is one of the most important ones that helps define the weak points of apps and websites before their launch. Testing itself is an essential stage of software development where all the QA initiatives save developers’ time and company’s money by finding problems or bugs fast and effectively. Overcoming these Software Testing Trends of 2021 will help testers to move beyond the mundane testing activity and leapfrog into a strategic position in the overall software development cycle. So, Dear Testers, it’s about time you pull up your socks and gear up to learn newest happenings waiting to transform the world of Quality Assurance.