Predictions 2021: Quality Assurance and Testing.
The global events of 2020 have pushed each organisation to be outward looking and business conscious. In 2020, we have seen further major shifts and changes in the orchestration and execution of quality assurance (QA) and testing. Now in 2021, the key QA dilemmas that enterprises need to solve are how to enable the teams to deliver quality at speed and how to ensure value is increased.
In a challenging, fast-paced, and competitive industry, business needs the right infrastructure and tools in place to help them work smarter and pivot quickly to meet customer demand. They have to evolve in sync with the latest trends in software or risk being left behind and ill adapted to the new reality.
Modern testing solutions are evolving and revolutionizing. QA is not just about finding bugs and errors anymore; it is a complex technical philosophy that also includes evaluation of a product idea, behavioural predictions, analysis of opportunities and threats, etc.
The world of online environments grows and delivers new challenges for the software testing industry every day. The pressures to get products to market and scale their production often weigh heavily on development teams of all kinds. Today, businesses looking to get the most value out of their software development must keep up-to-speed on current software testing trends,including best practices in terms of security and performance.
2021 promises to be a dynamic and ambitious year, so we expect some fascinating testing trends, models, and strategies to come to life. Here are some of the upcoming trends and technologies in quality assurance and software testing.
Technologies answer the need for speed
Owing to the changes in the political environment coupled with the volatility in the market driven by COVID 19, this year we will see a great requirement for speed and agility in testing to enable organisations to deliver their offerings to the market. This, by default, will mean that testing also needs to get more effective. To achieve this, we predict that testers will need to use technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to accelerate decision making in a much smarter way. We also predict that testing will see the greater adoption of digital technologies to enable teams to collaborate and take faster and better decisions.
Demand for multi skilled professionals
For the year 2021, we predict to see an on-going drive for the search of multi-skilled professionals. Organisations are looking for professionals who can bring different skills to the team, from being a developer to a tester to someone who understands security and can drive performance decisions, all in one. While there will always be the need for a specialist in the team, such as security or testers to name a few, the multi skilled professionals will be able to deliver on tasks quicker and in a more cost-effective manner as these professionals are also independent and self-steering. This will not only help in speedy turnaround, but also have a huge impact on the cost of quality.
Environments-on-demand required accelerating testing
The absence of fit-for-purpose test environments has always influenced testing timescales. With accelerated remote working and distributed teams, the ability to have environments-on-demand is more a priority than ever. We predict there is no other way that is more effective at reducing the overall test environment spend than migrating to cloud test environments and embracing testing and infrastructure automation. The on-demand model allows businesses to take advantage of public cloud APIs and only pay for the time needed to run through automated tests.
Less independent testing, more embedded testing
Business and Organisations are focussing on the need for speed and agility in testing. The recent studies shows that there is increasing adoption of Agile and DevOps and on the capacity to maintain and improve software after go-live. In short, this means we are witnessing a general transition of quality assurance to a point where testing will no longer be a discrete activity, but will now become embedded in every stage of the development lifecycle. We predict going forward testers and their capabilities will be more embedded in the agile team supported by a limited number of central QA experts.
The need to test AI
While the year 2021, AI will aid testing for better results and insights, we predict there will be a need to test and validate changes driven by AI. When AI makes cognitive decisions in customer offerings itself, there will be a need for QA teams to come up with an approach for testing the impact of the technology. This means checking if the change driven is ethical and is free of bias that is inherent to the data that is used to train the AI solutions. With more and more AI technology being used, testing solution providers will have to find the best way to validate if it is working correctly both functionally and ethically.