Software Testing Trends in 2020

According to Gartner, by the end of 2019, the costs of developing the IT industry will grow to 3.76 trillion dollars, and in 2020 - to 3.87 trillion. Thus, IT plays an increasingly significant role in our lives.

Major Software Testing Trends 2020 are:

1. Testing Big Data
2. DevOps development
3. Machine learning
4. Flexible approach
5. IoT Testing
6. Test Automation
7. Performance engineering
8. Development testing centers
9. User experience test

Accordingly, the time has passed when the IT product quality assurance team was the department responsible for manually checking the functionality of applications without much interaction with the developers. Ways to create software have experienced something like a revolution. In line with this, the role of software testing has grown.

Ensuring product quality today is not an ordinary process at the end of the development cycle. Now this is a complete part of the strategy that determines the fate of the application. With the adoption and spread of digital technology, software testing has gained a new look.

In addition to the trends of development today cannot miss the latest trends in quality testing. What will be the trends of 2020?

Testing Big Data

Big Data is a huge amount of data that is generated at high speed. When testing them, you need to make sure that terabytes of information are properly processed. The main task of this test is to evaluate the performance and functionality of applications.

At the same time, an increasingly important problem of such verification is the verification that each byte is successfully processed. After all, the volume of data today is colossal. And the more data, the more time is needed to run the test, more resources are needed for quality testing.

In this regard, 2020 may introduce platforms that can reproduce the behavior of individual layers of application data. Such installations will give the following guarantees:

• efficient processing;
• constant import of new data in parallel with the processing of old;
• reducing application installation time.

Accelerating the process will be available by eliminating the need to create new archives for each iteration.

DevOps development

According to Statista, only 9% of respondents have not yet accepted or are not planning to take DevOps. Such an indicator suggests that testing and monitoring of processes go to the same level with direct development. In other words, testers now "come into play" at the start of development, and not at the end. Writing and testing processes will be even closer to ensure continuous iteration.

Thus, the functionality of the application will have much more problems during the launch. This method ensures that any changes that are made during development will not harm the final product.

Test everything and always: only this way today you can achieve the perfect result.

Machine learning

Machine learning is one of the key directions of the future. It has already led some kind of revolution in the development and use of applications. Certainly, machine learning will touch and test, namely for:

• optimizing the test suite to search for excessive or vice versa - unique code checks;
• prediction - prediction of the main test configurations based on previous checks;
• log analytics - identification of checks that can (or should) be carried out automatically;
• defect analytics - identifying high-risk application points for prioritizing regression tests.

The market for artificial intelligence is growing faster. It is expected that by 2025 it will reach 190.6 billion dollars. This suggests that the IT industry is increasingly moving to machine learning. But this does not mean that development in programming languages and their frameworks will soon become irrelevant.

The more it will be used for software testing, the sooner each test will be based on obtaining a number of likely results. Testers will only have to conclude: are the data obtained statistically justified.

AI shows that the evolution of testing is entering a new stage, the benefits of which have yet to be learned.

Flexible approach

Along with DevOps, Agile approaches to testing are becoming more and more effective. Developers always know what result they should achieve. But in the process of creating an application, unforeseen problems or unique ideas arise that trigger changes in the code.

Thus, the development will always deviate from the intended plan. Applications are created in real time, in accordance with the requirements and requests of customers.

Based on this, testers should be ready for any changes and check them as they are received. Agile approaches provide not only testing flexibility, but also tight deadlines. After all, many changes can be made a day or even a few hours before launch.

What is required for this? Prediction of possible scenarios. That is, in addition to testing the existing code, the application quality assurance team needs to add its possible continuation and find out the reaction.

Thanks to this, they will be able to conduct an unplanned test of the product much faster and more efficiently, pointing out new problems.

IoT Testing

It is expected that by 2020 the number of smart devices will increase to 20.8 billion. For comparison, in 2016 there were only 6.4 billion. This clearly reflects the rapid development of the IT industry and the growing capabilities of the Internet of Things.

Previously, there was such a thing as "IoT-device". Today IoT is a full-fledged market. Every product, by its nature, is already part of the Internet of Things. But this entire market also depends on software.

Testers face a tremendous amount of work on monitoring communications protocols and operating systems and a multitude of possible combinations of all the elements involved. Given the wide range of IoT devices, the quality assurance team needs to increase knowledge regarding usability, security, and IoT performance.

The Internet of Things creates a new dimension in methodical software testing. The following types of checks will be conducted in the IoT area:

• testing the compatibility of device versions and protocols;
• monitoring connection delay;
• safety assessment (device authenticity, availability and correctness of authorization);
• scalability testing;
• data integrity evaluation.

Despite the growing role of the Internet of Things, 34% of the World Quality Report respondents said that their products have IoT functionality, but they still do not have a testing strategy.

Test Automation

Every IT trend is increasingly dependent on automated processes. Therefore, in matters of software testing, there also appeared a trend of transition to automatic verification of many processes and parts of code.

One has only to evaluate all the previous trends: the development of DevOps, AI and machine learning, the growth of confidence in flexible approaches - each of them, to a greater or lesser extent, provides for automatic checks.

The fight for consumers has become much more difficult. Therefore, each company is interested not only in attracting attention, but also in providing the maximum benefit from the product. How to achieve this? 100% of respondents answer that you need to combine the quality and speed of development.

There is a stereotype that these concepts are compatible only with the addition of the third element - high cost. But such claims are in the past. Today and in the future, high results can be achieved through automation.

Performance engineering

For many years, the task of testing has been to verify product performance. But now it is not enough to pay attention only to this element. In addition to it, it is necessary to focus on such components as convenience and practicality of use, configuration quality, customer value.

Thanks to the integration of testing as a stage, parallel development, it is possible to divide the test itself into several parts. Thus, the assessment of the quality of the application will be more accurate. In addition, it will allow you to successfully implement the idea of test automation. After all, small processes are much easier to transfer to a computer.

Development testing centers

Many people are used to the fact that testers are a small department within the company that is included in the work at the end of the application development. This was due to the simplicity of the products and the relatively low demands of consumers.

As mentioned above, today the situation has changed dramatically. With the development of technology, the demand for more and more elegant products is growing. Their implementation becomes much more difficult.

Therefore, more and more companies are paying attention to the creation of testing centers (TCoE). They provide specific monitoring formats, as well as off-the-shelf platforms and testing tools. Because of this, a software quality assessment process can be much more efficient.

User experience test

One of the main requirements for any product is high quality UX. Whether it’s a simple user or a good software developer, each of them should be easy to use applications. The company's task is to create the most user-friendly product.

Therefore, testing user experience is becoming increasingly important. This element has always been important for web development or creating mobile applications. But now it concerns any product and device.

Modern technology is a part of our life. Software in this regard is an integral element. Therefore, without assessing its impact on user experience, it is impossible to create a quality product.

Conclusion

Software testing, like any other development element, is reaching a new level, experiencing a lot of changes. Most attention will be paid to artificial intelligence, since many see it as the future.

Manual testing is gradually being replaced by automated. In 2020 we will see a certain hybrid of these two types since there are still not enough tools to fully automate monitoring and data processing. But in subsequent years, it will be possible to see an almost complete replacement of manual testing with automatic.

In the end, testing is no less important than the development itself. This is triggered by shortening terms, increasing requirements and the frequency of changes to the software code. Thus, the main trend in 2020 is the increasing role of the “testing department”. Companies that do not do the test a full-fledged part of their strategy will fail.  We also recommend reading the article - WHAT SOFTWARE TESTING TRENDS WILL APPEAR IN 2022.