An ever evolving software testing industry saw unprecedented changes in the last decade. While we are still struggling to cope up with them, newer pastures have grown. Needless to say, it is a definite challenge not just for the testers to continuously strive to learn but also for businesses to be aware of what is best for their application function, performance and security.
New technologies are coming in which are disrupting existing technologies which have been there since years. And it is always a challenge as a tester to address these upcoming technologies but overall we have seen the software testing industry knocking down these challenges with their innovations.
One trend which we saw in 2015 was to integrate testing early in the software development lifecycle with methods like Agile. Agile was widely adopted by many organizations along with the DevOps in a bid to get faster time to market for their apps. Also we saw a greater adoption of cloud computing, increase in virtualization and service oriented architecture which led to many testing tool vendors emerging with their offerings around that.
This post summarizes Top 10 emerging trends/predictions for the next decade which will change the landscape of software testing. This is based on our observations and experience with leading Fortune 500 enterprises and industry analyst research reports. It is interesting to discover each of these trends and to know how enterprises as well as testing professionals can get leverage these trends, re-strategize or re-skill themselves.
Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) is a role which has been existent since last decade or so but was way different from the traditional testing role. As early as 2020, we see that Test Automation will become mainstream and every tester will eventually don the SDET hat.
Open source is going to be the flavor for the next decade and a lot more organizations will be adopting these tools with a larger and more actively engaged support community in next decade.Open source tools are being adopted not only for Test Automation but for also DevOps, Agile etc.
As per Forrester, BigCentralized Test Centers of Excellence are a thing of the past. This is corroborated by the fact that Test automation developers are embedded in the agile teams. All testing activities are progressive, iterative, and fully integrated with development and automation developers and test strategists and exploratory testers are evolving. Overall it's a shift from testing to quality engineering.
Software development is no different from a Formula 1 pit-stop. A good team of software professionals decides the fate of product and a good pit-stop decides the fate of the race. With organizational focus on faster time to market and better user experience, Quality @ Speed is going to be the top priority. It's only going to get faster with greater quality with all the tools and technologies at disposal.
Majority of the organizations are embarking on digital transformation and reduced time-to-market life cycle with increased focus on QA and Testing. Digital assurance strategy should focus on optimizing functional testing across channels. It is more likely to mimic a user's behavior in today's world.
BigData is no more a "Fad" and the amount of data is growing with each passing day at an explosive rate. A strategy around Testing Big data is strongly needed given the rate at which it data is growing. Testing of these datasets involves various tools, techniques and frameworks to process and is going to be one of biggest trend to watch out for.
IoT is growing rapidly, your customers rely on products to be tested and effective – if they aren't, you may get lost in the crowd.Internet connectivity is what makes this network of things possible.What stresses the need of IoT testing is the fact that all these devices on internet are making them susceptible to hackers. According to a HP study, 70 percent of devices in the Internet of Things are vulnerable to security problems.
DevOps advocates collaboration and integration between businesses, developers, and IT professionals. With DevOps, Testing plays a vital role as Developers are more involved with testing and overall Quality engineering aspects.Faster deployment and quality assurance for todays' complex IT systems are helping enterprises realize quicker time to market in a cost-efficient manner.
We have heard this many a times that a good user experience is the key to a successful product.Giving a consistent performance across the platforms and devices is going to define the market share a product captures.
Organizations move from just Performance testing to Performance engineering is going to be swifter and the user experience is going to play a major role in that.
The change has already begun and IT trends such as Big Data analytics, Virtualization, Mobility and Cloud Technology will continue to push more and more companies allocating a major part of their IT budget (around 40%) towards QA and software testing domains.
If you would want to see the detailed analysis of the Top 10 Software Testing trends, you can mail us.
What do you think? Do you think there is anything else which should have got into this list?
About Kalyana Rao Konda
Kalyan is the President & Global Head of Gallop Solutions Inc. With 17+ years of experience in IT Services, specifically software testing, Kalyan has led large QA teams of 2000+ people at AppLabs as VP-Delivery and had been in QA leadership roles with Virtusa & BaaN earlier. He has a rare mix of high technical understanding with a pragmatic approach to testing services delivery.
A strong proponent of Testing-as-a-Service (TaaS) delivery model, Kalyan is a thought leader with hands on expertise in building large scale test automation suites, executing and maintaining them. He has a patent pending with USPTO for 'iGenerate test Scenario' and 'Web Services Validator' filed last year. Kalyan is a speaker at various testing conferences including DevOps East, StarEast & Agile Testing Conference in Boston. He was recently awarded the prestigious "40 Under 40 Award 2016" from the Philadelphia Business Journal.
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