The past decade has been exciting and overwhelming for QA and Software testing industry. The rapid revolutions and inventions in technology are keeping both, testers and developers on tenterhooks. Both need to keep themselves updated with latest technologies. Furthermore, they need to upgrade their skills to cope up with ongoing changes. To meet this demand of time, the QA and software testing engineers need to stay updated about the latest trends and technologies.

Since 2005, the Quality Assurance has been adopted in the early stage of the development cycle. The widespread adoption of agile, cloud and DevOps methodologies has increased the value of professional QA and software testing services. The invention of AI, ICO, etc. made a job of software testers even more crucial which led to more tech jobs. There are many challenges a software tester needs to face to assure the quality of software developed on the top of the AI or Automation concept. Also, usability testing has been a challenge for solutions developed on new concepts.

With reference to technological changes in the past decade in QA and Software Testing industry and other factors, we have predicted the top 7 trends that will rule this industry in 2018 and beyond.

1. DevOps Adoption

It is a perfect blend of Development, Quality Assurance, and Operations. It is a set of best practices that aim to reduce the time from development to operations. This process involves Quality Assurance team from a very early stage of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). This development practice is based on top of seamless integration of three different departments of IT Company: Development, Operations, and Quality Assurance. Each department works hand in hand to increase the quality of the end product during each stage of development. Also, it aims to reduce deployment and launch time. The early launch of the product can result in higher returns over investment and cost-effective marketing of the product in record time. According to the Google Trends, in the past five years, DevOps practice is adopted by many organizations and it will be in trend in upcoming years as well.

2. Increasing Trend of Intelligent Testing

Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have introduced many applications and solutions to automate certain operations. A successful application based on these technologies will increase productivity and resource utilization. The testing experts are facing challenges in generating intelligent analytics and test automation for these applications because this is a new concept. They need to put extra efforts in generating, test cases, data, scripts, etc. Also, the test execution and reporting need to be fast to assure the quality of the AI and Machine learning based solutions. In these types of applications, usability testing becomes really important to assure the revenues of the product after launch. AI and Machine Learning will be a hot buzz in the world for upcoming years. Thus, the testing and QA experts need to be proactive in this arena.

3. Test Automation Utilization

In a past few years, the technology industry has faced many new practices and inventions such as AI (Artificial Intelligence), ICO, IoT (Internet of Things), DevOps, etc. All these need a shorter possible software testing set. As we know, DevOps relies on the shortest possible testing and development cycles. Still, the software testing industry hasn’t yet integrated faster testing phases. According to the World Quality Report 2017-2018, the software testing companies use less than 20% of automation in the testing and Quality Assurance activities. To test these applications developed on top of AI, IoT, etc. at a rapid rate and to utilize maximum benefits of DevOps practices, the software testing companies need to increase test automation. The ability to integrate DevOps toolchains with the test automation tools will be crucial in upcoming years. The automated testing tools such as Selenium, Katalin, Ranorex, etc. have already started supporting integration with various toolchains of DevOps.

4. Perfect Blend of Automated and Manual Testing

Automated testing is the hot keyword buzzing the testing industry, but manual testing hasn’t lost its importance yet. There are still some challenges with testing automation in certain applications which kept the importance of manual testing intact. The testing companies use the perfect blend of automated and manual testing and this trend will be in town for some more years.

5. Big Data and IoT Are Here To Stay

All these technologies have been introduced in the past few years. The inventions are going on in each of this industry. Thus, the testing and QA companies need to have a strong strategy and tools to provide the best QA and testing service to the companies launching applications and solution on top of big data and IoT. The inventions are also blending different technologies such as an IoT application using Big Data or AI to provide out of the box applications. The testers need to keep their arsenal ready to test these types of hybrid solutions.

6. Ongoing Digital Transformation

A Majority of businesses has been transformed digitally to capture the widespread business benefits. The process is still going on; thousands to millions of businesses are going to transition phase. Thus, a demand for robust testing strategies is at a peak to assure the quality of digitization for a business.

7. Increased Trend of Mobile Testing

With increasing demand for mobile applications, AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) trends and other inventions, the mobile testing will dominate a large share of the market. Thus, advanced testing and QA strategies need to be in place to provide the service at rapid rates. The increasing competition in the industry demands the shortest possible development cycle. Thus, the software testing experts need to use more testing automation to reduce the testing and development cycle.

Conclusion

Quality Assurance and Software Testing have been in the industry for many years. Since 2005, it has been widely adopted from the initial stage of the SDLC. The rapid inventions and introduction of new technologies has increased demand for reduced development cycle to hit the market soon. This has increased demand of quality assurance and software testing as well as test automation. The software testing and QA companies need to buckle up their belts to work hand in hand with a strategic approach to meet the challenges and demands of different industries.