2018 was an exciting year for software testing. Agile adoption reached 97% and Forrester declared the year as the Year of Enterprise DevOps. The cultural and technological shift in testing in 2018 however is just the beginning. As 2019 begins, more testing trends will gain momentum resulting in testing hitting even more critical milestones.
That said, let’s check out what 2019 has in store for software testing.
Cross-functional teams for software quality
This trend isn’t new but it was only adopted by a few organizations in 2018. Many organizations went ahead and created cross-functional teams to evaluate and ensure software quality. Many companies have started considering cross-functionality a necessity to solidify the trust between everyone involved in software delivery while facilitating better collaboration and coordination.
As organizations prioritize software quality even more today, we will see this trend continue to be adopted by more organizations in 2019. The added bonus is the fact that QA teams get to contribute more by leading initiatives that improve the software’s overall quality.
QA will be QE
Until now Quality Assurance (QA) has been the approach of choice for a software development company that prioritizes product quality. But today, QA became too sophisticated encompassing a number of aspects including test automation, DevOps, and pipeline integration etc. More skills and technologies are involved now. Conclusively, QA evolved beyond what it used to be.
With quality being the priority for companies providing Agile software development services, and considering the rapid evolution of QA, the transformation is referred to as Quality Engineering (QE) now. As more teams in more organizations start embedding quality throughout the software development process, QE will expand proportionately. And that’s what we will start seeing in 2019.
Load testing will become a staple
Load testing was once a very challenging discipline which made it relatively less accessible to many testing teams. But technological advancements and the advent of new tools have made load testing accessible and intuitive. Load testing used to demand specific hardware that not all testers can get their hands on. It was an investment many organizations weren’t willing to make.
Even if the team did manage to procure the hardware, they are often required schedule tests in advance as many teams will be sharing the server during development. The advancements in cloud brought with it a solution to this particular issue. Cloud-based load testing platforms are now available that make it possible for testers to use multiple servers simultaneously thus eliminating scheduling conflicts. This will lead to wider adoption of continuous load testing in DevOps environments in 2019.
More demand for test automation
The increasing adoption of Agile and DevOps demanded many organizations to redevise their testing strategies to stay ahead of the curve. One of the major changes that followed was test automation that supplements manual testing. Companies that leveraged test automation became better at it in no time seeing a number of benefits in the process including faster testing cycles and improved test coverage for starters. It’s safe to assume that test automation levels will increase even further in 2019 as more organizations come forward to invest in it.
Conclusion
These are just the tip of the iceberg. There will be even more software testing trends that will turn heads this year as the field grows in importance while technologies simply it even further. More people will be pursuing a career in QA and more enterprises will realize how QA grants them high quality products that far outshine their predecessors.
