It is needless to say that most of our business plans were highly impacted by COVID and many organizations are still facing the adverse effects of the pandemic. Irrespective of the field or industry, many companies lost businesses and many employees their livelihood. However, there are very few that focused on the best possible ways to overcome the challenges put forth by the pandemic. Such companies and leaders in the market managed to keep running their business and continue to serve their customers using more efficient solutions. This kind of critical thinking to carefully handle unprecedented circumstances and market volatility is what many companies need to stay in business.

How Can Software Testing Industry Cope Up?

Change is constant! Just like every other business or industry, software testing companies are in the need to adapt to the ongoing changes in the market. So what changes are we talking about here? Remember the evolution of debugging to AI-led test automation? From manual testing to mostly automated testing methods, it is safe to say that software testing companies have come a long way. Along with the existing testing practices, there are few more trends in the industry that will make the lives of testers and testing companies in the market even better. The following are the testing trends that organizations should adopt or continue to practice for better business outcomes in 2021.

Scriptless/Codeless Test Automation

Rather than spending a lot of time on writing scripts, testers can automate test cases even without any coding knowledge by using sophisticated automated testing tools. Advantages of using codeless automation are reduction of time testers spend on recurring test cases, easy evaluation of code by non-technical team members, and no need for programming or coding skills. Besides, codeless/scriptless testing tools allow users to automate swiftly through reusable tests by enabling testers with less/no exposure to test automation to automate test cases.

QAOps

Nowadays, testers and QA leads are involved not only in software testing but also in every stage of the SDLC. QAOps, the combination of Quality Assurance and IT operations, collaborates developers, testers, and operations by integrating the QA validations into the CI/CD pipeline rather than having the Quality Assurance team function separately. This QAOps strategy ensures to identify errors faster and accelerate the product-to-market process. The efficiency of the QAOPs approach to meet deadlines faster than ever makes it a buzzed aspect in 2021.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

This duo has been the talk of the town for years now and is still known for the latest progress in the field of software testing.

AI and ML have transformed the software testing process into a powerful and self-driving task with least manual intervention.

This intelligent pair of technology benefits the testing teams with their unique advantages like the following.

  • Predictive analytics – Forecasts the potential challenges and issues based on user behaviour. This analysis empowers the testing teams to mitigate risks even before they release the software.
  • Bug tracking — AI and ML-based technology in test automation process will enhance the accuracy of error identification and tracking for earlier defect fixing.

Blockchain Testing

Blockchain is nothing but a shared database or platform to collect and store data, allow the customer to perform safe transactions. Since the growth of blockchain is enormous in the recent past and number of organizations relying on blockchain technology is rising drastically, there are very high chances of the risk involved in it. This is why testers and QA teams are required to develop an effective blockchain testing strategy that will not compromise the technology.

Selenium 4

Usage of Selenium, an open-source test automation tool, is not something new in the software testing industry. Selenium can be rather called a suite, instead of a tool since it is a collection of several testing tools that are mainly designed with an intention to meet most of the test automation needs. Its multifunctional features like supporting various programming languages, OS, and cross-browser compatibility are widely used by testers around the world. Having mentioned its versatility, Selenium 4 is to be released with many new features like relative locators, open-source Chromium driver support for Edge browser, selenium grid, docker support, etc. in the market that leaves testers with excitement.

Performance Engineering  

Delivering high-quality products without any performance issues is the desire of any organization that wants to be successful. To achieve such scalable, stable, and seamlessly performing software, organizations are deploying performance engineering strategies right from the development stage. By implementing performance engineering from the earlier stages, testers and QA engineers can evaluate the performance of the software on the whole and after adding any feature or functionality even with a poor or low network connection. Since the number of DevOps teams in IT companies are constantly increasing, testers and QA engineers should adapt Performance Engineering to deliver the best of user experience.

Penetration Testing or Pentest

Testing experts in the industry iterates that “data breaches have grown in intensity and frequency in recent months as cybercriminals take advantage of coronavirus confusion”. Slightly different from Security testing, Penetration testing or Pentest focuses more on the security vulnerabilities like possible entry points, attempt to break in, and report back the findings. By identifying the loopholes well in advance, organizations can deliver secured apps to the customers. Also, Pentest can be implemented for APIs, microservices, and backend applications. Since the need to mitigate security flaws is high, Pentest is crucial to avoid such threats and let organizations focus on the other core tasks.

Mobile app testing automation

Did you know that the Global Mobile Application Market is expected to reach $407.31 Billion by 2026? The number of smartphones purchased every day is proof that the number of mobile apps used by customers is sky-high. This is the reason why mobile app testing is a lot important that it was earlier. These apps must be tested across different devices, browsers, and OS. In order to cope with the numerous apps with a plethora of features and options, testers should develop more agile and efficient end-to-end testing strategies. To ensure seamlessly performing mobile apps, testers and QA teams should perform more and more comprehensive tests using the best automation tools that reduce the time taken for testing and the chances of human errors while test execution.

It is doubtless that there is a huge scope for independent testing in the coming years and it is best to focus more on building, testing, and delivering secure, scalable, and seamless software or product to our valued customers. In order to be able to build such reliable deliverables, development and testing teams should embrace the above-mentioned testing trends are most likely to produce positive results.

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