Top 5 Latest Trends in Software Testing Industry For 2019

Increasing adoption of methodologies such as DevOps and Agile testing proved to be one of the key software testing trends that was seen in 2018. With the advancements of information technology, the software testing industry is also evolving at a fast pace. Modern software development teams are no longer content with the testing phase of a software to happen as a last-minute affair. With DevOps being adopted by modern day software development teams, here are some of the latest trends in software testing industry that need to be adopted by a QA, tester in 2019 to continue to remain competitive among peers and to stay ahead of the competition.

1. Quality Assurance Will Drive DevOps

The fundamental idea behind DevOps is centered around achieving a seamless and end-to-end collaboration among the QA team, the programmers and other critical teams such as IT and back-end team of a business organization.
A very important portion of the product development is now being handled by the testing team, as developers being increasingly involved in building the application, unit testing, fixing the identified defects and overall maintenance of the application.
This is resulting is a much greater speed of quality assurance. Code deployment is being fueled by DevOps which is ultimately resulting in higher ROI and cost-efficient software testing.

2. Cloud-based Cross-Browser Testing

It is practically next to impossible to manually perform cross-browser compatibility testing of applications across hundreds of combinations. This is where the popularity of cloud-based cross browser testing tools such as BrowserStack, Sauce Labs and Cross Browser Testing has come into picture.
The use of such cloud-based testing tools is going to remain very popular in the coming year as well as these tools offer seamless integration of other popular Open Source software test automation tools like Selenium and Appium.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will Influence Test Automation

Software testing is steadily shifting focus and importance to higher level of automation. Automation is not only helping to ensure better test accuracy but also helping in achieving higher precision in test execution and reporting.
Meanwhile, the world has already started turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI) with an aim of trying to make products more reliable. This trend will continue in 2019 and we’ll see less focus on manual testing as we move towards an environment where AI influences test automation efforts.

4. Popularity of Big Data Testing

Big Data is nothing but significantly high volume of critical data that is generated by a system at very high velocity. Thus, while performing Big Data testing, the big data testers are required to verify that TBs after TBs of data are successfully handled successfully by the application under test (AUT).

In such type of testing, not only the volume but also the quality of data is a very critical factor during big data testing. As the complexity of applications being developed grow exponentially, the demand for big data testing will also grow as the year progresses.

5. Integration

With reducing product delivery cycles, the importance of integration of various elements of an application development cycle becomes even more evident. Data from different sources like the requirement management systems, test management systems, version control systems, activity management systems, and the testing environment need to be in sync to facilitate a smooth execution.
Hence the need for integrated tools and third-party tools that offer easy integration of existing tools become very important. Though integration was used merely as a sales tool so far, now we expect it to assume a key place in product development this year.

Conclusion

To remain relevant and ahead of the competition and peers, QA engineers should seriously consider these latest software testing trends. Nobody can predict the future but the best way survive any impending technological disruptions in the software industry in general and in the software testing industry in particular is to be ready for change. I hope that the aforementioned software testing trends should help QA testers in being prepared for the in-demand skills and software tools for the year 2019.

This article was posted by a software tester from our community who wants to remain anonymous.

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