Time to get innovative! The top 10 software testing trends in 2022 // part 1

As the world is moving towards digitalisation, we witness enormous changes in technological advancements. Many industries – such as development, design, testing, and delivery – experience the benefits of these changes. Organizations focus more efforts on digital transformation, therefore the demand for software testing becomes greater every day. This is supported by the World Quality Report for 2021-2022, which predicts that the automation testing field is expected to hit the milestone of USD 30 billion by 2028, as company executives are giving more gravity to QA than ever before.

To always be at the top of our game and thus be able to deliver cutting-edge solutions to our clients, weCan’s developers constantly search for new innovations and techniques to master. Discover what technological developments the next few years have in store, and see what our experts think are the most influential software testing trends of 2022!

The rise of Agile and DevOps

Faster product life cycles, quicker releases, small autonomous teams – these are the demands of the current landscape. Consequently, testers had to adapt to these flexible development frameworks, leading to a surge in DevOps and Agile methodologies in 2021. These will continue to set the trends in 2022, enabling a huge boom in Agile development and testing, making it one of the most widely adopted ways of delivering.

The Agile method improves collaboration between various teams through customisable methodologies, so that it can meet the specific needs of each project. The earlier the QA, development, and business analyst teams collaborate, the greater the chance that the final product will be of high quality.The key is to get end-user feedback early as possible, so course corrections can be made if necessary.

DevOps is about automating and streamlining the entire development lifecycle. The key to DevOps testing is to adopt the best Agile testing practices, as the more continuous integration techniques are used to ensure good execution, the better the quality of the results will be.

And what are the results of these? Faster delivery, more frequent deployments, more satisfied end users and higher quality. Qualities, that are an essential part of all of weCan’s projects.

The era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)

While DevOps and Agile are making software development faster and more flexible, rapid releases and higher expectations of delivery time require more innovative testing.

AI and ML promise to make testing smarter. Algorithms are being developed to generate better data, reports and test cases. They use reasoning and predictive models to help teams identify and solve problems faster. Through the integration of AI and ML in software testing, the time required to complete projects is reduced, increasing cost efficiency by saving manual effort while also reducing the risk of human error.

They keep getting better and better, which is why they dominate software testing trends in 2022. AI and ML learn from their past iterations to drive future improvements and better decisions, which is why many US companies are moving towards ML and AI test automation. Gartner reports, that the market is likely to grow by 70% in the next year.

However, the application of AI/ML in testing is still in its infancy – it is, however, a very promising area. Organizations will find ways to optimize their testing practices through it, and weCan’s experts are convinced that testers who develop proficiency in these techniques will be in high demand in the coming decades.

Time to embrace mobile testing

Mobile devices account for the majority of devices used to connect to the internet, compared to desktops. In the current business environment, any organisation that can establish a mobile testing laboratory, take responsibility for managing the devices and automate the testing of mobile devices will be at an advantage.

When testing on mobile, it is important to think from the end user’s perspective. Usability, look, feel, size, colour and all other features need to be thought through to the end. Exploratory testing is also very important to ensure a good mobile user experience. Most of the testing is done through emulators as it is an easier option. However, QA should use physical devices wherever possible, as this perfectly mimics the end-user experience.

The most popular tools used for mobile testing, and worth looking out for, include Appium, Calabash, Frank, Robotium and SeeTest.

Automate your tests

There is still much scope for increasing the adoption of test automation in organizations.

Existing automation tools should continue to evolve with new features and more advanced methods that allow easier and more effective utilization of test automation. Some of the most used testing tools are Selenium, Katalon, Cypress, Cucumber, Testlink, and TestNG.

The replacement of manual testing with automated testing is one of the most prominent trends of 2022. The key advantage of automation is that it allows many simultaneous testing, which can be performed at any time, independently of human intervention. A well-developed automation package increases the overall productivity of development teams, as bugs can be found sooner and overall turnaround times are faster. It also reduces costs and allows resources to be optimised by supplementing a lot of manual testing.

However, there is still a lot of untapped potential for test automation to become more widespread in organisations. Our experts suggest that existing automation tools require new features and more advanced methods to make test automation easier and more efficient, before the practice can take its rightful place in the development mainstream.

Rapid Software Testing (RST)

As James Bach explains, RST “is a responsible approach to software testing centered around people who do testing and people who need it done.”

This methodology, which weCan’s developers argue sets the trends for the coming years, includes tools, but strongly emphasises the role of trained technical staff in managing and guiding the process. Modern software development is driven by people – RST is a mindset and skill set that supports people to take responsibility for the testing they do. Ontology, humanism, and heuristics – the essence of RST lie in these.

These were the first five of the top 10 software testing trends to follow in 2022. But since our world so is full of unprecedented exponential changes driven by digital transformation, our experts will continue the list in the next blog post! Stay tuned for the second part of the article.