The turn of the millennium witnessed a shift in technology trends, with digitalization creating mass demand for fast-paced service and automation. The market approach now is clearly about ‘Survival of the Fastest’. This has led to a significant rise in the demand for automation of workflows to support digital transformation.
According to a recent survey conducted by Forrester, the trends indicate that a large number of organisations around the world are in the process of automating their business either partly or fully by the year 2025.
Organisations are investing in research and innovation to find new and intuitive ways to improve their workflow efficiency and adaptability. The software industry is undergoing tremendous change with a lot of risk-taking and management as it adapts to the new automations and technologies. Therefore, automating software testing is now seen as a critical requirement to achieve these goals for such organisations. A recent report by MarketsAndMarkets claims the global automation testing market size is anticipated to be around USD 52.7 billion.
Many automation testing trends are highlighted, some of which are pointed out by industry experts as the ones to look out for in 2023:
1. Upgradation in Mobile Testing
Mobile automation is still in a growing phase and developers are trying and testing tools to stabilise and maintain various frameworks. This kind of automation does not have the same development time as compared to web application automation. With the extension of AI and ML into mobile devices, AI-driven codeless, scriptless mobile automation solutions are now introduced in the testing market. The use of Web 3.0 and blockchain applications will offer mobile testing a modern level of dynamic.
2. Headless browser testing
A headless browser means a browser without an interface and hence it is not visible on the screen. In this case, the program runs in the background, where you can keep track of it with the help of a command-line interface or a console. That’s why it is known as a browser without a UI.
With headless browser testing, you can perform end-to-end testing without the need for the browser to lead, which decreases the chances of instability and makes everything run smoothly and fast. Therefore, testing becomes reliable, fast-paced, efficient, and effective. It further helps in multi-tasking and saves time as unit testing is not required.
3. AI-driven software testing
With the launch of Chat GPT, Bard, and other groundbreaking advancements in AI, it is expected that the same will have significant impact on various software and processes in 2023, which includes software testing. According to Gartner, seven out of ten organisations will implement AI testing by the year 2025. From new technologies such as intelligent computer vision to natural language processing, everything in between will save cost and time in testing efficiency.
4. Digital twin testing
The upcoming industry, i.e., industry 4.0, connects the digital and physical realms, and for that, having a digital twin model has now become crucial to fulfil the needs. The digital twin market is expected to double, reaching USD 183 billion by the year 2031. This concept is anticipated to gain traction in software testing and will deal with the difficulties of sophisticated software content making cross-platform testing more efficient.
5. The ‘Shift Left’ testing
Shift-left testing focuses on moving the testing process closer to the beginning of the software development cycle. By shifting the testing of a product or software towards its early stages, the organisation can build quality codes, provide proactive collaborations, save time and money, and eliminate code patching. This means one gets more unit testing to catch problems when they are introduced and facilitates lower costs as bugs are easy to detect and cheaper to fix, thus increasing efficiency in SDLC, and improving end-product quality.
Conclusion
Software automation testing has developed a lot in the past few years, though manual testers are still important and needed. Automation eliminates manual efforts, but it is also important to understand that a machine can’t operate alone. A well-known tester can easily write test cases so that a small number of automation scripts can offer more coverage. Though these innovative solutions have contributed to some of the most critical missions, which include COVID virus tracking to NASA’s Orbiter launch, The bright future shows the usage of test automation software will continue to grow.