Future of Automation Testing: 9 Important Aspects that Expects Change in Future
The future of automation testing looks bright as more and more companies realize how important it is. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses still haven’t adopted this technology yet. When they don’t test their products correctly, it can take a long time to find and fix any issues that arise, making customers lose faith in them.
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Software Testing Evolution
Software testing has changed a lot over time. At first, it was just developers manually checking their code to ensure it worked. But as software got more complicated, automated tools were made to speed up and improve testing. Nowadays, testing is an integral part of creating software – there are all kinds of tests like unit tests, integration tests, system tests and acceptance tests that guarantee the software is top-notch and meets what the user wants. Thanks to these changes in testing, we get better quality software faster and cheaper.
Organizations need to get why test automation is so important right now. When businesses realize they must invest in test automation to ensure their product stays high-quality, the main issue is that they don’t want it to mess up their release schedule. They wanna look at how much it costs to set up and run test automation and figure out if it’ll be worth it in the end.
Nowadays, companies need to keep developing new features before anyone else does. This means they don’t have time to do all the testing steps every time they release something. So, it’s not just businesses that need to use test automation tools that fit their needs – the tools themselves must be created with a return on investment in mind.
What Drives Changes In The Future of Automation Testing?
- Automated testing tools can help quickly test and validate these applications to ensure they work correctly. AI and ML are technologies that make testing things faster and more accurately easier.
- Agile and DevOps are ways of doing things quickly, which means automated testing is even more important. Cloud computing makes it easier to do lots of tests at once, so you don’t have to wait as long for results.
- The rise of IoT (Internet of Things) and mobile apps, automated testing helps make sure everything works correctly.
- Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) means that you must ensure your code changes don’t cause any new problems or mess up anything that worked before. To do this, you have to include testing in your development process – and it has to be automated!
- Open-source automated testing tools are becoming more popular because they’re flexible, cost-effective, and people can help each other out with them.
- New programming languages and frameworks are being created specifically for test automation – making it easier for you to write tests that won’t break later on.
More people want test automation engineers, so new tools and technologies are being developed to help software developers use these tools more easily.2 things for sure need to be handled in the future in terms of test automation:
- Increasing the automation test coverage as much as possible
- Making test automation less complicated and time-consuming
Let’s see below how different aspects of testing are going to change in the future:
9 Things That Will Impact the Future of Automation Testing
The future of automation testing is anticipated to bring various growth opportunities in the software testing field due to its rationale-based transformation.
Exploratory Testing
Exploratory testing, as the name suggests, is the testing methodology where the tester is free to test the software. This type of testing is less time-consuming and fits the current accelerated delivery cycles compared to traditional testing approaches.
The Advantages of performing Exploratory Testing are:
- Valuable time is not spent on documentation of the features and test cases
- More time can be spent on test automation and automating those areas that can recur
- Only the features that are not automated yet need to be tested via exploratory testing
Thus, the future of testing automation, where most of the test cases will be automated also means that any features that are pending automation can be tested via exploratory testing.
Cloud Infrastructure
At present, Cloud Computing is a trend that is being rapidly adopted, and companies prefer using the cloud. A few major advantages include:
- The option of adding or removing infrastructure as needed
- No extra investment needed for hosting or physical space
- No overhead of maintenance of software and hardware
- 24/7 access to the infrastructure
- Reduces the time needed for infrastructure setup on the premises
Refer Benefits of Cloud based Automated Testing Tools for a detailed discussion on the benefits of Cloud based testing.
In the future, like other services, test automation will be hosted on the cloud, and the cloud infrastructure will be used for execution and reporting of the test results.
Continuous Testing
Continuous Testing aims to provide business risk feedback in terms of quality as quickly as possible such that the fate of a release can be decided. This testing is supposed to happen with each new change or build and can be integrated with CI/CD tools.
Automation can be scheduled to be executed after every build compilation, and test reports can be sent after every build.
Thus, in the future, releasing builds will be easier with feedback available after every new check-in, which the help of continuous testing will enable.
Microservices Testing
Flexibility, ease of reuse and componentization, a few of the unique features that the development using microservices’ architecture offers, are tough to ignore. That is why Microservices Testing is expected to be the next big thing in software development.
And because development and architecture for microservices-based applications will differ from those followed in traditional software development practices, testing for microservices need also be revamped.
Thus, in future, testing for microservices will be a skill that will be in high demand.
In-sprint Automation
At present, 70% of organizations have adopted agile. The trend is only expected to grow because of the way. Agile guarantees focus on both the speedy delivery and quality for every release.
Some companies use agile and scrum methodology but keep the testing activities for the features developed in one sprint for the next. To make testing and automation faster and efficient, the better approach will be to aim for testing and automation in the same sprint.
In the future, more companies are expected to adapt in-sprint test automation and move towards a product with high automation coverage.
Crowdsourcing
The new method of testing that is gaining traction rapidly is Crowdsourced testing, where only a team may not be required to have all the tools and skills for testing, but the testing will be distributed according to the skills and tools that a tester already has.
This type of testing ensures that testing is faster and scalable because of the possibility of getting different types of testers at short notice.
In the future, Crowdsourced testing will prove to be an economical and quicker option where different types of users are expected to test the product on different configurations and devices. This will especially be helpful for applications targeting geographically distributed audiences.
Testsigma is launching a fully integrated crowdsourced test automation platform to fine-tune the product to the best standards. Learn more about the crowdsourced platform here.
Scriptless Test Automation
Having discussed the need for an increase in the percentage of automation and the speed of automation in the future, the present barriers stopping companies from adopting test automation need to be addressed.
One way to reduce the time and resources spent creating automated test cases is by using scriptless test automation. Scriptless Test Automation requires a minimum learning curve and is easier to use.
In the future, more organizations are expected to start using scriptless test automation to maximize automation coverage.
Read here – Latest Automation Testing Trends
NLP Based Automation
In Scriptless Test Automation, the latest entrant is NLP(Natural Language Processing). NLP aims to simplify automation of test cases where the user can use Natural Language to write the test steps. With the minimum learning curve, the user has to use Natural Language constructs, and some backend configuration and test cases are ready to be executed.
Such automation does not need special skills and can be done by anyone, including manual testers, developers or project managers. Involving more people from the organization in the test automation process also means increased test coverage and less resource cost.
And as most of the fields are using NLP now to interact with humans, test automation industry’s future is also headed in the same direction.
AI in Software Test Automation
There is a lot of work going on in the field of artificial intelligence, and software test automation industry is sure to catch up; there are now tools already on the market that are empowered by AI core that help in the creation and maintenance of automated test cases.
In the future of test automation, artificial intelligence will enable the creation of automated test cases with minimum effort, and the test cases will maintain itself(self-heal) automatically.
With tools like Testsigma, the future of test automation sure looks bright because it is a complete package for anyone looking for a product that does not compromise on quality and still gets out in the market on time.
Testsigma has an AI core and allows test case creation in NLP. Having solved the problems of test case creation and maintenance, they also provide integration with most of the popular tools for CI/CD and reporting. Also, they provide test hosting on the cloud and a test lab on the cloud that offers various devices and resolutions to test your applications on.
Conclusion
Automation testing is changing fast with new tech, methods and tools. We’re seeing a shift towards scriptless and codeless tests, BDD and TDD, plus more focus on user experience. AI, ML, blockchain and RPA might also be used more in future as software gets more complicated. Automation testing will become even more critical to make sure software works properly, so businesses need to keep up with these trends.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Automation Testing Good for future?
Automation testing is a great way to ensure software works well and quickly. It can help us save time and effort and improve the quality of our programs. In the future, automation testing will become even more critical with the introduction of new technologies like AI, ML, and blockchain.
What is the Future of Software Automation Testing?
Software automation testing in the future is likely to move away from using scripts and code. Instead, more focus will be on ensuring the user experience is excellent and using new technologies like AI, ML, and blockchain. Testing distributed systems and complex architectures (like containers and microservices) will become increasingly important too.
Will AI replace Automation Testing?
No, AI isn’t going to take over automation testing completely. It’ll be used with automation testing to make it more accurate and efficient. AI can help make tests automatically, detect patterns in the data from tests, and increase the scope of what’s being tested. But people still need to look at the results of the tests and decide if the software is good enough.
