Validation Services: Tech Trends and You | IVL Global
Validation Services: Tech Trends and You
“Whoami”, While firing commands on Unix/Linux, I often wondered about this question. “Who am I” Really!
The answer to this largely depends on the context of the question. If it is in the professional capacity the answers are multiple and varied. What defines who am I, my designation, or my role? For me it is simple, I am a Tester, a hardcore software application tester.
Software testing is an ever-changing field. As per the ‘World Quality Report for 2019–20’ Top three trends are,
- Intelligent Automation
- AI & ML in Quality Assurance
- Test Data and Environments
Currently, the demand for speed has evolved the role of quality engineering. The industry is looking for enablers to maintain quality with speed. Trends are changing and only automation is no longer sufficient. ‘Intelligent Automation’ is the need of the hour. 65% of business users have difficulties in automating, owing to the frequency of changes and updates in the application with every release. It is evident that in the coming years, there would be a major shift across business interests in automation techniques.
A survey conducted for ‘World Quality Report 2019–20’ has recommended for Intelligent Automation as,
- An intuitive and dynamic intelligent automation framework
- A Dynamic intelligent automation framework
- Self-Generating environment
- Intelligent prioritization of regression testing
- Self-provisioning test data automation
There is a balanced approach to Test environments. Though, 1/3 of companies are still using traditional methods to maintain their test environments. However, many companies are moving towards virtualized and containerized (Docker or smaller) environments. Organizations are taking a holistic approach at an enterprise level. They are building critical capabilities that are worth a center of excellence approach to delivering test data on an ‘As-a-Service’ basis to the scrum team in an agile environment.
The industry is still figuring out the extent to which they can explain AI behavior. The success of AI implementation is not just about AI skills but its amalgamation of general business acumen, known traditional skills-based on statistics, math, and skills & knowledge about a specific industry. Pro-active defect finding methods are increasing. Many application teams are going for advance testing, through production log monitoring for an incident to raise defects before the user notices it.
How Do I get there?
The future of software testing implies versatility and automation. However, manual testing will always remain, but the manual tester will be gone. Testing must be supported by technology fencing. Top trends in software testing are DevOps, AI in software testing, test data automation, API & Services testing, Performance Engineering, and Test automation using BDD (Behaviour driven development). Tools like Maven, Jenkins, Gradle, Kubernatils, PMD, Ansible, Puppet, Docker are the latest trend in DevOps. Selenium is one of the best test automation tools. However, today AI is playing a major role in the domain. There are loads of other tools available that are AI-powered like Applitools, Appvance, TestCraft, Functionize, Testim, etc.
Impact of COVID-19 to the latest trends
The quality engineering field does not remain untouched from the COVID-19 pandemic. Cascading impact will also impact quality engineering. The co-located team structure will be gone. The virtual workforce will form a new era of agile development methodology. We need to evaluate new tools, Especially mobile device testing. The physical device lab must convert into the mobile cloud and Build Test assistant BOT for testing. In short, the next era is Autonomous Automation.
Originally published at https://www.ivlglobal.com on June 25, 2020.
