The software testing community has come through many interesting trends through the year 2017. These trends mainly include the newly introduced practices in software testing. Trends like adopting newer test automation tools & practices and DevOps are found to be usually followed, which in turn has resulted to increase in automation being performed on various web applications. While some tools are still facing issues like managing the environments as well as test data, shortened release schedules and lack of time for proper testing.
1. Working together with manual & automation tools: It’s true that automating every single thing sounds interesting and easy for everyone for once, but, in reality, automation makes it difficult to face challenges in complex test environments and data and ever-shortening delivery cycles. At this place, manual testing comes in handy. Hence, merging the manual & automation testing practices have always proven to be really useful. The ability to get integrated easily with the DevOps toolchains have proven to be the most crucial feature of automation tools which is mostly in demand these days. Most of the open-source and free automation tools are KataLon and Selenium as well as some commercial tools.
2. Emerging mobile test automation: As compared to earlier years, we can clearly see a shift of the software world towards Mobile applications, away from web and desktop applications. The same can be said as the reason for the introduction of Test Automation in mobile applications testing in order to shorten the time-to-market needs of software organizations. Although, lack of the right tools, devices and methods to execute automated testing of mobile applications still exist there, still emergent mobile test tools and platforms such as Sauce Labs and Kobiton offer the right and radical capabilities to make mobile test automation more affordable and executable.
3. Cloud Testing: What we don’t find in the web and mobile applications, is expected to be found in the cloud. As a result, along with manual and automation testing on mobile and web apps, today’s world is improvising Cloud testing services more and more. Testers can easily test the web traffic for web-based apps. Other than that redundancy and performance can be scaled through cloud testing. Cloud Testing provides users with the facilities like pay-per-use price and reduced time to market.
4. Pursuing more DevOps practices: By definition, DevOps is a set of practices that target reducing the development to operation, without sacrificing the quality of software. DevOps Practices have been appreciated and pursued overwhelmingly for the past 4-5 years & are likely to be followed in coming years too. Many groups are expected to pursue DevOps practices completely, in near future. As DevOps practices highlight integration and automation, more tools and practices are presented to support continuous integration and automated testing.
5. Automating - API Testing practices: The trend of automating the testing practices for services and API testing processes is currently at a better pace than automating the UI testing process and are expected to grow further. Independent testers who are equipped with easy-to-use and intelligent tools will be accountable for services and API testing which will help in reducing time-to-market while refining software quality.
6. Integration of tools with various environments and ALM toolsets: To support smart analytics and testing, data has to be collected from diverse phases and sources in software development such as change control systems, requirements management systems, test environments and task management systems. We will witness test automation and management tools presenting features to integrate with various test environments and ALM toolsets. This integration helps in smarter decision making regarding software quality and testing.
