Nowadays we can see thousands of new software coming into the market each with its own unique features.
To stay alive in this competitive world, each software needs to have a significant quality. To design a defect-free software, software testing is a critical part of any software development lifecycle.
Without proper and thorough testing, releasing software in the market is a mistake.
Due to this reason, organizations are spending time and money on more and more effective testing methods, for the new technologies and new products coming into the market.
In this article, we will discuss some major software testing trends which are on the verge of high growth in the coming years.
- Blockchain Testing – As per the World Economic Forum, up to 10% of global GDP could be stored on blockchains by 2025. Today, almost everyone has heard of this term, ‘Blockchain’. Blockchain is a technology present in the market for a long time. In simple words, blockchain is a distributed ledger where no transaction can be modified.
Even though it is a popular term, not many people are aware of the actual working of this technology which makes it more interesting as nowadays more organizations are trying to develop products based on blockchain.
This point takes us to the next emerging trend i.e. blockchain testing. Blockchain testing is still a new thing for many testers as it demands new testing skills such as Peer/Node Testing and Smart Contract Testing. As the development of the blockchain-based products arises, demand for the testers will arise which makes it another crucial trend in the coming years.
- RPA – RPA stands for Robotic Process Automation. RPA focuses on automating business processes/operations/tasks using robots to reduce human dependency. RPA is popular among industries such as banking & finance, healthcare, e-commerce, BPO, etc.
One of the use cases of RPA is software testing. RPA tools are not designed specifically for test automation but given the nature of the RPA tools, they can be used in test automation for certain test cases. RPA tool can be programmed to execute test cases and prepare reports for these test cases.
RPA can also be useful in regression testing for executing a small number of test cases.
The advantages of the RPA tools are that they have drag and drop functionality which makes it easier for the user to learn them, they are flexible as they can be used on any platform, they save time and provide better accuracy.
- SDETs – SDET stands for Software Development Engineer in Test. An SDET is an IT professional who is involved in the design, development, and testing phases of the SDLC. As the testing roles in today’s organizations keep evolving, it becomes important for testers to expand their skills.
SDET role is more challenging than the QA engineer’s role. SDETs are responsible for developing a robust test automation framework. For this, they need to have a deep knowledge of programming and also learn a test automation tool like Selenium WebDriver.
The responsibilities mentioned here can make it very clear that SDETs will be in demand in the future given the all-rounder role which is expanded over almost all the SDLC phases.
- Smart Products Testing – Smart products are consumer products that are self-aware and adaptive among many other capabilities. Smart products collect data from the users and analyze them, they communicate with other devices, thus the term ‘Smart’. Some of the popular smart products in the market are Google Home Voice Controller, Kuri Mobile Robot, SmartThings, etc.
Smart products are becoming more and more popular because of the convenience and flexibility they provide which will also increase demand for testers. Testing a smart product is a bit different than testing any other software as these products use AI and ML.
- Crowdsourcing Testing – Crowdsourcing testing is becoming more and more popular in these days. Crowdsourcing testing involves taking the help of a crowd of testers available on various testing platforms to test the system.
The benefits of crowdsourcing platforms are that they give quick and effective testing as the number of users is more, all the testers on the platforms will be able to test the system in different environments, organizations can get honest feedback, etc. Moreover, it is also a cost-effective solution as testers will be paid only for the bugs that they have found.
- Cypress Parallel Testing – Perform End-to-End Cypress Parallel Testing in cloud on a fast, reliable, and scalable infrastructure of 40+ different browser environments. Reduce developer feedback times and release your products faster, with confidence. A next-generation test execution platform for agile QA teams. Test execution on cloud that matches local test execution speeds, and costs as much as a flexible spot instance cloud.
Conclusion
Organizations are spending more money on various software testing methods as now they can understand the criticality of the testing process. With the increasing focus on software testing, many new trends will appear in the market.
This article includes some important testing trends that we will be able to see emerging in the coming years. Many of these trends are already in the market but they are yet to be popular.
