A rapidly evolving world has caused customers’ expectations also to expand rapidly. Meeting these needs mandates that companies cannot stick to strict and old-fashioned methods and change their tools, technologies, and business processes.
Software testing and quality control is no exception to this need. According to Gartner, over 88% of leaders feel that their current quality assurance practices are ineffective and do not match their customers’ expectations.
Here are some of the emerging QA trends that are helping organizations transform their quality assurance practice from being a bottleneck and becoming a disruptor that increases customer satisfaction by creating exceptional end-user experiences.
Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning:
Automation has already been established as a part of large-scale testing, but it is still a part of the trend due to the difference AI&ML can bring to test automation.
- AI can quickly create and update automated unit tests performed as a part of the CI/CD pipeline.
- AI can use image recognition techniques and create automated UI tests.
- One of the problems with automated API testing is the need for testers to analyze and modify tests manually. AI eliminates this issue by studying patterns, grouping APIs by scenario, and updating or creating new tests according to the scenario.
- AI also helps with generating test data and validating automation tests.
- With artificial intelligence still in its developmental stages, we can expect more maturity in automation testing in the coming years.
Scriptless Test Automation:
Deploying AI&ML in automation testing may not be feasible for every organization, but writing and optimizing code constantly for automated test cases is a big challenge. Organizations struggle to find skilled resources to write and maintain the scripts for test automation. This gap between manually writing and maintaining automation test codes and AI&ML is what scriptless test automation fills.
Scriptless test automation employs a flexible framework where instead of writing codes to create test cases, it is enough to write the steps, and the framework converts them into test cases. This reduces the time to deploy automated tests. It also reduces the cost of running test automation because it doesn’t require resources with automation test expertise. Anyone can write down the test cases and run them from manual testers to product owners and business experts.
This way, scriptless test automation can be used even by non-technical persons to perform much exploratory testing.
With many tools available in the market that can enable scriptless testing, this is a testing trend that is definitely on the rise.
QAOps & Continuous Testing
QAOps takes the already successful DevOps framework of CI/CD and builds on it. QAOps is all about fostering collaboration between development and testing teams from the beginning of the SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) and accelerating delivery timelines.
Continuously testing and fixing bugs from the early stages of development prevents many issue logs in the last stage of development and automatically makes the QA function’s activity preventative instead of reactive. This also eliminates delays, improves quality, and saves time.
Since QAOps creates overall value for the development & testing teams, company, and customers, it is only a matter of time before every quality-focused organization implements QAOps as its standard testing strategy.
Performance engineering:
We have been talking about meeting customers’ expectations from the beginning. What better way to satisfy customers than creating a seamless user experience, right?
Traditionally, organizations have conducted performance testing to ensure that their software satisfies the pre-determined response time, load, and stability criteria. If issues are found, the code is fixed to meet the requirements.
Performance engineering goes several steps above mere performance testing and tries to figure out why there is inadequate performance, identifies where it occurs during the development process, and addresses the issue from its root.
In short, performance engineering has taken the performance testing process and transformed it from an issue fixing module to a culture of preventing the issues and creating excellent value for the end-user.
What’s in Store for Quality Assurance in the Future?
There are several other trends in quality assurance such as:
- Leveraging IoT to divide the workload and test different combinations across multiple devices and operating systems
- Using big data to drive decisions about testing strategies
- Performing highly secure tests through the use of Blockchain technology
In short, there’s no dearth of new technologies, tools, or strategies in software testing. It is now up to the organizations to revisit their goals and make Modern Quality Assurance a part of their success strategy.
Wondering where to begin your Quality Assurance Revamp?
Start here with this whitepaper.
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