Latest trends in QA and Automations

Software Testing and following the Trends is one of the essential parts of any software development. As any tips, software testing tips can be helpful in your development life cycle. Besides, the advent of new automation tools in software testing (or QA) has resulted in major developments in software testing, design, development, and delivery. Automation is a process in QA and testing to reduce human assistance in repeated and monotonous test cases.

Automation needs to be discussed in an order with efficiency. Automation makes things — such as the process and outcomes of people’s jobs and roles, and entire business operations — efficient.

With the hype of automation and digitally-backed transformations, Automation is becoming intelligent and more important than ever. Automation or say intelligent automation, has been contemplating the usage of AI or machine learning to craft the decision-making process smart and automated.

Automation has a dynamic category that comprises fast growth, steady innovations, and wider adoption are all sewn into its methods. However, it has been predicted that in 2022, the automation category might move at an unpredictable and positive pace.

Thus, maintaining the pace of the ever-changing portrait of testing, the tester should be familiar with the latest trends in automated testing.

Following this, we have gathered 7 trends in automation that might capture the abstract of future growth factors in testing automation industries.

Market of open-source testing tools

Teams experience a high level of safety, quality, and processability in their achievements with the help of open-source software. For newGen testers, these options make the learning environment and work conditions simple and effective. The reason why testers follow the trend of choosing the open-source testing tools is the aspect of a safe and thorough assessment of testing; it allows them to perform tests in more specific methods. That is, testers can incorporate tools that can provide efficient safety check estimations and identify all, various, crucial issues in the codes, for example:

• Jmeter
• Selenium (Selenium 4 especially)
• Robotium

However, new IoT devices will be introduced in 2022 and subsequently newer tools will also appear and we need to stay updated for all such debuts.

The Approach of Shift-Left and Shift-Right

Shift left or shift right testing approaches tell us about shifting the testing process towards the left (to development side) or towards the right (production side) depending upon the requirement. The rise of the shift-left approach motivates the teasers to mention test cases right after the requirements become clear, which pushes the development and testing stages to move simultaneously. On the other hand, the shift right approach highlights the testing, monitoring, and upgradation of apps in the production surroundings instead of delivering the entire responsibility to the Ops teams.

Moreover, the focus should also be balanced and distributed equally between the left and the right approach. The shift-left approach paved a better development path to reduce the bugs at the coding level and the shift-right approach created a plan for the team to keep testing the product even after a good user base. It leads to better user satisfaction and real-time load while doing performance testing.

The shift-left approach is becoming one of the trends in the automation market and the coding knowledge of the testers is also getting more perks. It might be a possibility that the testers will opt for coding experience as well while choosing the testing club.

Prediction of TCoE as an upcoming trend

The testing center of excellence (TCoE) is defined as a framework where the testing platform, processes, and standards are maintained as a concentrated service and split across the organization, and it has been long-awaited in the IT sector. Some analysts and testing experts confidently predict that this method will outnumber the other trends in 2022 and become a hot trend in automated software testing. TCoE is a sort of structure that finds and integrates various methods for high-quality testing.

Such types of structures produce a capability to incorporate new testers into any test cases scenarios to enhance their efficiency and pace. It also provides:

• The way of less time-consuming in any test cycle without disrupting the quality of codes
• Effective automatization
• Way of improving the system where sublime methods for the company are created.

Robotic Process Automation: Its impact on Test Automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) is a technology that makes software robots easily engineered, maneuvered, and managed. Such robots mimic human actions while interacting with digital systems and applications. With its evolving role in the automation testing domain, RPA has illuminated its value in manual efforts testers put in testing types such as load, regression, performance testing, etc, and now testers’ teams can focus more on usability and exploratory testing. Unlike previously, RPA trends will be among high-impact automation QA and testing trends. Companies can be benefited in the following ways by implementing RPA:

• A high-quality and well-maintained product, which leads to a better user experience and customer service
• Digitizing process data efficiency
• Cost reduction by reducing manual efforts
• Making organizations adhere to vital standards and regulations

Cloud-Based Cross Browser Testing

Nowadays companies don’t develop applications responsive to specific mobile tabs or desktops. Now they prefer the development being mobile-specific or moving towards a mobile-first approach. Presently. Hundreds of devices are occupying their spaces in the market with their own specifications like resolution or browser compatibility. If we start considering all devices and specs, the testing process and setting up the relevant infrastructure would be costly. This is why most companies have shifted towards cloud-based cross-browser testing environments.

These months have seen high demands in using cloud-based frameworks or SaaS platforms. Companies are trying to adapt to such a changing environment of automation. For example, the Oprimes, as a SaaS platform can help you test your web/mobile applications seamlessly across multiple devices/OS/Browsers. Along with manual testing, teasers can execute Selenium automation also.

Role of Automation in Risk Compliance and Security Testing

Since the data security and compliance market is also booming, developers are pushing themselves to create a more data-secured product, while developing and deploying the product. Some States follow the data security laws and regulations, such as the European Union’s Global Data Privacy Regulations (GDPR), and therefore companies tend to adhere to these security rules. Similarly, other areas have other relevant regulations

The bad news is you can no longer use a customer’s real data to test real-time scenarios. The demerits of these regulations are some sectors cannot use customers’ real-time data scenarios.

However, Some alternatives such as chef.io can scan software systems and find out any void that can become a threat to data security, or any test data not adhered to specific data security standards.

Some other automated test management tools such as EMS Data degerator or Datprof can help you in data marking and artificial test data creation. Such data creates a real user data simulation. Hence, testers can perform tests while meeting security laws.

Meanwhile, you can run security audits, employee learnings and arrange training for security and compliance aspects for the purpose of checking the data security from breaches or hacks. It will prevent the companies from any government actions or lawsuits.

These reasons are making this automation trend a prominent one.

NoOps for Automation

The concept of DevOps and NoOps have become a point of attraction for companies and automation experts. NoOps means no operation and its objective comprises the unloading of platform management parts developing a streamlined interaction among developers and infrastructure. At the time of automation changing trends, thinkers are trying to utilize almost everything that can ease their way to futuristic automation goals and NoOps perfectly suits their narratives. The task of the NoOps is to make the utmost work of the Ops team automated. Although it is still evolving, the concept is one of the favorites of the thinkers.

NoOps also has some restricted usage. For example, If a startup or a project doesn’t have the systems or processes completely automated, the use of NoOps faces constraints. In this way, automated analytics can be denied by a fully functional IT Ops team anytime. Hence, human intervention is required at the current moment to some extent.

Conclusion

However, the automation industry is trying to eliminate manual intervention completely. It is nowhere that it seems possible in the near future, as to operate a machine, we will be needing human hands. And even so, automation is evolving routinely. The requirement of a skilled manual tester is still alive and the testers are also evolving concerning automation. They are studying selenium, hands-on automation tools and, sometimes, writing codes to stand in the recasting and expanding market.

The indexes related to safety, delivery time, compliance, and AI-backed are increasing for a few years, which can help the testing community to work and learn for more popular testing tools, and thus the demands for such evolving testers will eventually grow.

Next year the developers will focus on making their software safer. If the issues of IoT are not fixed, it may lead to a massive data leak and poor functionality.

A crucial feedback we receive is the combination of automation and manual testing. Although Ml and Ai will help the automation tools to become more popular, some aspects will be obsolete and bug-filled if not manually tested. And if the combination is well accepted by the testers, they will be able to conduct more kinds of research in the testing industries to perform better.