Gone are the days of traditional testing methodologies. What lies in the future has always been a box of surprise when testing is considered. Testing has always taken continuous transformation starting from the traditional manual testing to reach the heights of AI and ML. 2019 comes in as no surprises for new innovations in the field of testing. Here is a list of top trends in testing to look out for in 2019.

The scope of ML and AI in Testing:

As the buzz is already around Machine learning, it will bring in a revolutionary change to the workflow and the process that already exists, although companies understand the need for incorporating AI, they are still struggling to identify where to apply it.

Applying AI for testing is yet to come to light, there is no widely accepted approach or guidelines for industries to follow; hence it is still in the process of experimenting with various approaches.  In the survey conducted by WQR, 57% of respondents said they were experimenting new approaches for using AI and ML for testing. Once implemented this will help in increasing the effectiveness and shorten the test life cycles.

The new age Testing of IoT Applications:

The number of organizations that work with IoT in some form has increased from 83% to 97% says the wqr. Industries have already started to engage IOT functionality in their products, but they seem to lack a proper test strategy that is needed for the testing of IoT applications. IoT in today’s world is gaining traction as more and more devices are intelligently connected.  Emerge in the IoT-enabled applications have created a need for industries to equip themselves to leverage IoT leaving apart the disadvantages that comes with it without saying. Stepping into IOT testing will be a big leap for testing companies who dream to stand out in the crowd.

The increasing trend in Test Automation – The Shift from QA to QE

The transition from quality assurance to quality engineering is the next big step in test automation. The world quality report of 2018-2019 states that the top testing strategy in the coming years is end-user satisfaction.  This is proved with the considerable increase in the adoption of automation testing year to year.  The major factor that influences and encourages companies to experiment with automation is to derive the full benefits of the agile and DevOps approach. Test Automation ensures to bring out high-quality software as the manual effort is reduced and in turn, the defects are reduced.

Big Data Testing:

According to Gartner- The data volume is likely to expand by 800% in the next 5 years and out of which 80% is unstructured. This expedites the need to validate data in large amounts at rocket speed.  The key components of big data application testing are data validation, process validation and the next important component is the output validation.  This is where ETL testing comes into place; it refers to the process of validating, verifying, and also qualifying the data without any data loss and also preventing duplicate data. Forrester forecasts big data tech market to grow 3X faster than the overall tech market and also 40% firms are implementing big data and another 30% are planning to adopt big data in the coming months.

Big data testing is one of the promising fields in the overall tech market. By applying the right dose of test strategy, companies grappling to stand ahead in the competition will see increase in their growth cycle.

Going from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering:

Performance Testing has been the dominant part of testing as customer experience is the essential factor for an application to trend in the market. Keeping this in mind performance testing is taking an evolutionary turn towards performance engineering.  The concept of performance engineering is to start testing from the very first stage of development in order to reduce scrapping and rewriting of code in a fully developed product.

The moving forward from performance testing to performance engineering is no cakewalk.  The teams must be ready to shift their attention towards studying the way how all parts of the system work together rather than simply running performance test scripts on focused parts. Performance engineering dwells around collaborating with metrics to deliver high-quality products to exceed customer expectations.

Cost of Quality will become a priority:

Cost of quality is not the cost that is involved in creating a product or software.  It is actually the cost that would not have been expended if the quality were perfect.  In a report by CISQ, the cost incurred for cost of poor software quality was estimated to be $2.84 trillion.  This creates the need for companies to look into their cost of Quality.  Optimizing the cost of quality through test automation is what that will gain importance in the near future.  As Automation decreases the amount of manual efforts needed, it will make way for increased quality and also eventually reduce the cost.  This would become a must see for companies before stepping into Test Automation.

DevOps takes the center stage again in 2019

The adoption of DevOps has never seen to go down in yester years, even though many industries have adopted the DevOps approach the evolution in the field is growing to its peak.  Teams will start leaving behind their legacy approach to venture into new trends. Forrester’s predictions in DevOps says to fill in capability gaps and manage risks better, firms will create a holistic approach to scale up their DevOps initiatives.

Cloud-Based Testing to stay ahead in the race:

“Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world,” said Ed Anderson, research vice president at Gartner.  This emphasizes the need for developing a strategic approach towards cloud based test automation.  Cloud testing provides a wide range of benefits to organizations as and when they move to agile. Incorporating cloud-based test automation enhances the scalability, and enables continuous delivery as cloud services support various tools like Jenkins, TFS etc and also reduces cost.

Be immune to the disruptions:

The upcoming year is full of innovations and new engineering to make the software development process quicker, to stay ahead in the market with finished products. The above-mentioned trends will help industries and companies to be at the top of the testing curve by procuring new tools and keeping their testers updated with the needed skills. At the end, every step taken is to enable testing at a great speed without deteriorating the quality of the product.