Testing in 2020: 8 predictions about the future of Software testing
Introduction What is the future of software testing? How will the world of software testing look like in the future? The global software testing market is projected to grow at 14% CAGR by 2023. With the changes in the software methodologies and widespread acceptance of agile and DevOps, software testing has evolved into a dynamic practice that just doesn’t happen at the end of the development milestones. The currently advised practice is to integrate software testing into the mainstream of software development so that it goes hand in hand with the other processes. BDD (Behavior Driven Development) will play an important role because it encourages the use of agile methodologies during the development stage as well as testing stages. Using agile methodologies helps identify bugs earlier in the cycle, which results in immediate bug fixes and focuses on building a quality product. Test Driven Development (TDD) has also been shown to save more time than traditional development. Test cases help shape the source code in a very goal-oriented manner. But this evolution of software testing will continue further as newer technologies emerge and newer trends come to be in vogue. Software testing will always continue to be important, but it will evolve to capture a wide range of interesting spaces. Source: Secondary Research, Expert Interviews, and MarketsandMarkets Analysis Software Testing Predictions for 2020 Test Automation will assume center stage- Manual testing has been dying a slow death for some time. Companies are investing in technology and personnel that enable them to do test automation. Test automation commands efforts at the initial setup stage but the efforts get reduced in the test execution stage. It also helps set up smoother delivery pipelines. Hence, by 2020, companies are likely to be favouring automation to set up more dynamic delivery pipelines. Open source tools will rule the roost - Open source tools will be very popular in the next two years. In this time, companies will switch over to open source more than ever. Open source tools have led the innovation in the continuous integration model. Open source tools are also hugely popular (already) in the test automation space. Their popularity will grow and probably give proprietary testing technology, a run for its money. Open source tools have the advantage of being configurable and customizable for a specific domain, which would warrant a different set of policies and guidelines. Testers in 2020 will be seen using a considerable number of open source tools. The software testing skill will grow into development territory - Software testers have been donning multiple hats ever since testing came around. They were frequently regarded as the domain experts and the ones who understood the application deeply. The demand on their skillset is only going to rise with the increasing popularity of test automation. The Software Development Engineers in Test (SDET) is finding growing acceptance in the industry. A tester in 2020 will be expected to know about tinkering with tools related to continuous integration and test automation and will also be expected to be able to set up test-cases without developer support. Continuous deployment will drive testing - The exciting release times into production and the continuous delivery pipeline has caught the fancy of the software world. Amazon apparently releases to live within seconds and a great continuous deployment strategy has been credited for such wizardry. The future of testing involves better DevOps integration with testing. The pressures of timely delivery are also going to grow, which is why continuous deployment is going to be the close cousin of the testing department. Big data testing will become significant - Big Data has caught up with the IT world or it may even be the other way round. Big data brings big challenges in testing to the table. The speed at which the data comes in including its size and variety can easily be nightmarish for the regular tester. Hence, big data testing involves a specialized approach that can cater to the enormous data volumes involved and also utilize the power of the tools that are used in big data. By 2020, big data will be common and so will be the testing approaches around it. Usability testing and mobile experience testing to finally arrive - User experience is one of the biggest developments of the past decade. The stream of user experience has grown to encompass the devices and platforms that are in use today. With the growth of user experience, the testing efforts around it grew as well. By 2020, Usability Tester will be a veritable job designation and the skills around it will be specialized around the different mobile devices in the market. Multi-device testing to become very important - Apart from usability testing, the testing for multiple devices has also been growing at a steady rate. The onset of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) trend has spurned numerous devices into the market. It goes even beyond the traditional realm of embedded systems where it was possible to do some chip-level testing. The tester of 2020 will have multiple layers of tasks involving testing different devices, some of which may even be household devices and every-day-use appliances. This multi-device testing will need testers to become more conversant with IoT and be well trained for the challenges. Security and penetration testing will be important- The SSL ‘heartbleed’ bug and other security vulnerabilities have birthed a range of data-leak episodes. The job of testing to root out all security flaws in a system and to produce a comprehensive report about the same is more important than ever. This importance is also slated to grow into a new and specialized role. Testers will have the arduous tasks of finding out the security loopholes in a system that could be decentralized, dynamic and spread over a number of devices (in an IoT setting). By 2020, the security tester will be at a different level altogether. Conclusion Software testing budgets are also expected to increase going ahead. More and more companies are coming to realize that quality assurance measures are important to put a well-built, high-quality software in the market. Software testing will evolve into a range of new dimensions by 2020 and the software tester of today will have to grow to fill much larger shoes in just two years. The tester of 2020 will have to contend with a different IT landscape, filled with cutting-edge technologies that demand automation, continuous integration among other features, rooted soundly in the basics of software testing.
