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The software testing industry has been transforming for the past few years and continues to re-aligned to the business needs of the IT industry. Its focus from software testing is changing to quality engineering and risk reduction.
Both the IT industry and software testing domains have different yet relevant trends that organizations should be focused on to remain relevant.
Let’s look at some key areas of software testing that will see a lot of traction in the year 2022
Hyper Automation Testing: The new trend around the block will take a platform-based approach where test automation of web applications, mobile apps and desktop apps will take place with a heterogeneous tool set. We will also see a growth in open source tools as well as low code platform for automation testing. The year 2022 will also see a greater focus on implementing In-Sprint Automation, wherein testing teams are performing functional testing in 1 to 2-week sprints, designing and executing automated test cases within a sprint is bound to provide benefits of shift-left, quality improvement and faster time to market.
Another trend is to take automation to next level, called as Hyper-automation, that combines the power of AI/ML and automation technologies. This will help achieve faster, scalable, high-quality product development.
The use of AI will help to automate the areas within the automation testing process, which are still performed manually such as functional test case writing, identifying regression, impact analysis etc.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning: Artificial intelligence is already implemented in several use cases in the industry and its effectiveness is increasing as the days pass:
There are several uses of artificial intelligence in software testing:
- Risk prediction in code-based historical data and key variables
- Optimization of testing efforts and timelines based on risk profiles
- Fine-tuning of regression suite and self-healing frameworks
- Analysis of application logs, identification of errors and automatically find failure reason
- Prediction of key test configurations and quality index levels
Security Testing: There has been an increase in the use of IT applications in the last few years, we have observed an exponential increase during the covid period, in addition to that, we also saw a sharp rise in cyber security incidents including ransomware. The positive effect of all these problems is the enhanced focus that organizations are now putting on the security testing of the applications, systems and infrastructure. The year 2022 will see greater traction on security testing right from pipeline security to DevSecOps to penetration testing. As security is picking up fast and has a large attack surface area, it’s important to perform security testing in layers. A customized security testing strategy will have a combination of DAST, SAST, IAST and API security tests spread across guidelines from NIST, COBIT, ISO 27001 and PCI DSS.
As per the world risk report 2022 of the World Economic Forum, the cyber vulnerability data trend is worrying:
- 435% increase in ransomware in 2020
- 3 million gaps in cyber professionals needed worldwide
- 800 billion estimated growth in value of digital commerce by 2024
- 95% of cybersecurity issues are traced to human error
Companies need to upgrade their infrastructure and ramp up staff skills to tackle cyber vulnerabilities. Security testing can help alleviate cyber risks by shift-left and implementing a continuous security testing pipeline.
UX/CX Testing: User experience is increasingly becoming a key factor in customer engagement and helps retain the existing user base. There will be an additional push to achieve a good user experience for applications used by organizations, especially websites and mobile apps. This is of utmost importance for organizations that use such web or mobile applications for business e.g. ecommerce, insurance, etc.
There is a plethora of tools available both in open source as well licensed categories spanning from user profiling, customer journey mapping, accessibility, user persona analysis, sentimental analysis etc. The best approach to UX/CX testing will be to understand the business flow, Application landscape, target customer segment, customer touchpoints, marketing mix and competitor analysis.
Performance Engineering: Performance of the application is imperative from a usability standpoint and users see it as a primary factor to either continue using the application or discard it. The organization’s focus will now be on the performance and results right from the architecture designing level to usage on production.
The market has seen some good traction in the performance testing tool segment, such as:
- Tricentis acquired Neotys
- Perfecto acquired Blazemeter
These trends are clearly giving good signs as performance testing is going to become a part of the DevOps cycle, performance as a pipeline. It will be great to see full pipeline testing for non-functional areas including security, accessibility and performance.
Agile, DevOps and Lean: Agile has helped organizations to bring the teams together and remove the compartments of BA, developer, tester, system engineer etc. and has set up expert teams that are working together to deliver good quality deliveries. Similarly, DevOps ensures that applications are deployed frequently and automatically thereby enabling faster value delivery to end users. Lean helps in the continuous improvement, removing the extra waste from the system and processes.
These practices take place at various stages in the organization and this year will see further adoption among its teams.
Continuous and automated testing enabled with CI/CD pipelines augmented with AI will help achieve faster & quality software delivery thereby enhancing customer experience.
Conclusion
The future of testing in the year 2022 will be more technology-enabled. If you are looking for more updates on upcoming trends of testing and how to prepare your teams to harness it, you can connect with me at Yatender.sharma@igtsolutions.azurewebsites.net
Source: Gartner
Author:
Yatender has 20+ y
ears of experience in software test engineering. As the head of Testing Practice at IGT Solutions, Yatender is actively involved in innovations related to test engineering covering new tools, technologies, and solutions, and enabling IGT’s clients to achieve faster time to market quality improvement, and optimization of developer efforts in overall SDLC. A result-oriented leader, proficient in delivering high customer value and achieving excellence in service delivery management with proven skills in consulting and managing large and complex test programs. When away from work, he enjoys reading on a variety of topics and spending time with kids.