After the global shock of 2020, what trends, changes, new software testing types did those working in the software testing industry expect, and what actually became of them? The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated processes at many companies, forced most companies to remote work, while consumers and customers continued to expect high-quality products, and software development teams had to accelerate their delivery rates to stay competitive. How did all this shape the software testing profession in 2021?
What are the key trends the market and the software testing profession expected in 2021? Let's see them in detail.
The AI/ML trend is expected to grow in 2021, as the promise of artificial intelligence is that it can speed up processes, increase efficiency, reduce human error, and in some cases increase overall test coverage. More and more test automation tools are being added with AI capability, reducing the effort to create and maintain scripts.
Cyber security has been a growing problem for businesses in various industries even before the pandemic, and this trend was expected to intensify further with the growth of teleworking and digitalisation. It is essential for software testers to ensure that there are no vulnerabilities that can be exploited by cybercriminals. So an emerging trend in security testing was expected in 2021.
Last year, it was assumed that in 2021, the software industry will increasingly use code-free automated testing tools that require software testers to have no coding knowledge to create test case scenarios, and these tools will help reduce the time spent on repetitive test cases.
It is expected that in 2021, the need to test mobile applications will be greater than ever. This is due in part to digitization that extends to the customer experience and in part to the fact that access to an automated testing platform has now become easier. This allows software developers and operators to quickly test mobile applications and achieve the quality they want faster.
The popularity of big data today is unbroken, being used in almost every major service and manufacturing sector in the world because businesses want to use the data to develop practical market strategies and improve targeting. Mining this data also requires testing. Thus, in 2021 (and beyond), the demand for big data testing is expected to increase.
More and more organizations and development teams are working according to an agile or DevOps culture, which is increasing the need for continuous testing. Continuous Testing (CT) phase consists primarily of two parts, performing smoke and regression test phases, but can be customized depending on the project or organization.
As the popularity of IoT grows, so does the need to test individual IoT devices and systems that integrate IoT devices. For this reason, an upward trend in IoT testing was expected this year.
Data-driven testing, which is considered old school, has been predicted to become trend again. Because many organizations continue to perform custom tests on different data sets, which is a very time-consuming process. To overcome this, it is best practice to compile a single data set that contains different test data for a test script. Thus, data-driven testing allows multiple executions to be performed in a single test case.
Exploratory testing revived in 2020 as testers looked for non-scripted methods to test their software and improve quality. Exploratory testing is used by testers to set specific goals that ensure application stability in a variety of undocumented scenarios. Exploratory testing is a great method that allows testers to test the application as a real user.
Not testing, but its toolkit is very similar to testing. RPA is playing an increasing role in digital transformations because it reduces the frequency that is very often repeated in live systems the amount of time spent on task activities. In 2021, for example, due to the pandemic, the automation of robot processes was expected to intensify, especially for parcel services.
According to Attila Mészáros, R&D manager of ProofIT, what are the software testing trends that actually realized during 2021?
“Based on the testing projects carried out by ProofIT Kft. in 2021, we experienced the growing demand for automated testing services. The world economy is moving towards faster, more precise and smarter use of human capabilities, which we can very well support with our test automation platform and test automation services.
In the multinational and public administration environment in which we operate, our projects followed two distinctive patterns this year, as we did last year. It is present at our customers at the same time:
- long-term construction, capacity building, when it is possible to proceed according to common roadmaps planned for years with the increase of testing maturity, including test laboratory introductions, system adaptations, measurable risk-based approach, methodological training,
- and, in parallel, short-term projects that respond to immediate pain and ad-hoc needs are common when it comes to providing test coverage for critical processes or performance testing for changes that are close to deadlines.
According to our experience, the international trends expected for this year in the Hungarian market have developed as follows:
- there is a real increase in interest in all areas that can be transformed into infrastructure, and we also provide tool support for these within our own platform: low code / no code capabilities (3.), testing of mobile devices (4.), ensuring continuous testing (6.) and ensuring significant reusability in a data-driven manner (8.),
- due to the essence and underdefinition of exploratory testing (9.), the area where senior testing experts who are also familiar with the business area will always be needed with little intensity, we also provide this in this form,
- IoT (7th) and big data (5th) projects are still sporadic in the Hungarian market, due to the relatively low level of innovation and the smaller size of companies, this area will probably start to develop only with a significant phase delay,
- The highest expectations were clearly raised in advance by the applicability and introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), but there is still much more of a general manufacturer's promise than a concrete result in practice. Therefore, at ProofIT, we have started the research and development activities of a component that supports the preparation of a test based on machine learning, where we want to solve the problems that actually arise in everyday practice at home. We will report on the details and progress of this in separate articles” – said Attila Mészáros, R&D Director at ProofIT.
