One of the biggest trends we saw last year was more companies putting their faith in Agile and DevOps. In 2015, most organizations were quite hesitant to adopt Agile. That’s the thing about technology. It keeps bringing new things into the picture – from machine learning to big data and VR/AR. 2016 shortened the distance to a digital future with technological advancements, and it will most certainly transform software development and testing sooner than later.
So what could it all mean for a software tester?
Promise, primarily.
Let me explain. One of the main goals of any software company now is delivering products and services in a short amount of time without compromising quality in any way. Technological advancements promise to make that come true.
Keeping an Eye Out for New Trends…
Now that most businesses have adopted agile development and continuous delivery with DevOps, testing practices have also changed. In order to benefit from the concept of DevOps and what it brings to the table, continuous integration, delivery, and testing are vital. And it needs a good amount of planning. That’s why it’s important for a tester to keep an eye out for changing trends in testing.
When new technologies start disrupting existing ones, it is the right time to change plans may it be software testing or development and deployment.
Here are 6 trends that might bring about that disruption this year.
Agile and DevOps will Reign Over the Rest
Agile and DevOps have been proving their mettle for about 2 years now, dominating the software development industry. According to Forrester, they might completely dominate the industry this year. As testing is evolving to be more iterative and progressive, they will be integrated with development for certain. This attests to why Agile and DevOps has been consistently dominating.
Mobile Testing
With businesses starting to embrace mobile devices and mobile technologies, the role of mobile testing as a test automation trend will influence the software testing industry more this year. As of now, functional and security testing are big challenges when it comes to multi-channel devices, as the right set of tools and expertise to perform them are limited. However, the demand keeps rising. Mobile testing has also started to move to the cloud. All these facts points to a potential change in mobile testing automation.
Big Data
The concept of Big Data was quite unique, and presented a lot of opportunities for businesses. It has been growing in popularity and practice since its introduction. And now there’s just a massive volume of Big Data which demands better strategies for Big Data testing in addition to effective analytical tools and frameworks. Because it’s sticking out like a sore thumb, 2017 will offer something that might alleviate the present testing challenges with Big Data.
Impact of Containers and Microservices
Both containers and microservices come with good news for testers. With containers, a clutter of configurations wouldn’t exist and the demand for compatibility testing will be reduced. Microservices, on the other hand, can break down testing into smaller units. But because there could be deployments of multiple versions of microservices that’s hard to deal with, configuration could become challenging. However, as test automation has shifted testing to the service level, there are a few benefits.
There could be some much needed advancements this year that can make things easier for testers working with containers and microservices.
Security Testing for IoT
IoT is growing faster than expected, which in turn increased the demand for IoT testing. The product’s functionality and security need to be tested before release, as many studies claim that most devices in IoT are vulnerable to threats and require better security.
Testers will have to adopt some grey box measures to test the interactions between various layers in IoT product. If this year promotes virtualization of IoT APIs and services, testing the products will be less challenging.
Growth of Software Testing Budget
The growth of software testing budget turned many heads last year. It’s expected to increase even more this year as testing has become an absolute necessity to ensure product/service quality. Businesses have started to increase their IT budget considerably for QA and testing.
Conclusion
Last year, we witnessed many innovative technological advancements that accentuated digital revolution. This year isn’t going to be any different. In fact, this year might actually become the gateway to a different level of digital transformation than the one we’ve been seeing so far.
If the software development industry undergoes transformations this year, it would surely impact software testing as well. The trends mentioned above are most likely to bring about that transformation. Rest assured, testers will have their hands full this year.
