The software testing market in the UK grew by £1.1 billion in 2022, which changed to £1.9 billion in the current year, 2023. The days of rooms of manual testers executing complex step scripts to decide if the software is fit for purpose are long gone.

This does not mean that the role of exploratory testing has also gone, as such activity can still unearth unforeseen interaction issues. However, it is now generally accepted that the best practice is to automate repeated tests to support an ever-accelerating release cycle. This blog looks at the trends in the world of automated testing today.

Updated Trends in Software Automation Testing

Though many testing techniques are trending, we emphasise the latest and most useful techniques.

1. Shift-Left Testing

2. Mobile and IOT Testing

3. Performance and Security Testing

4. Agile Automation Testing

5. QAOps Testing Technique

6. Virtual Regression Testing

7. AI and ML in Automation Testing

Let’s explore all these trends in test automation one by one and help you decide which one will be the best fit for your project. 

1. Shift-Left Testing

As agile methodologies have overtaken waterfall practices, shift left testing has become the accepted approach to find bugs early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

What are the Latest Trends in Shift-Left Testing?

• Using unambiguous requirements, tests can be orthogonally created in advance or in the same timeframe as the development, allowing bugs to be found in the sprint. 

• In the sprint, a collaboration between testers and developers often uncovers the pathologically worst-case scenarios and drives the need for well-structured test data

• Both functional and non-functional tests can be considered earlier in the SDLC

Worth reading: Shifting Left vs. Shifting Right Testing

2. Mobile and IOT Testing

The Internet of Things (IoT) has exploded, with Smart mobile phones often becoming the User experience (UX)  for point interactions. However, the sheer number of variations between products and models has created a minefield matrix of Operating Systems, Networks  (WAN, LAN and NFID ), Browsers, Application Functionality, Loading speeds, performance, security and User Experience.

So, it becomes essential for developers and testers to automate the application testing process on mobile devices. Testing mobile apps includes testing their functionality, performance, loading, security, and usability.

Consequently, IOT automation is the latest trend in software testing. As our smartphones evolve into intelligent devices, new advanced applications emerge that provide a wealth of information about your health, education, food, or anything else you seek with a single tap. In this case, IOT testing by Quality Assurance is required to ensure the performance and security of IOT devices and systems. 

What are the Mobile and IoT Testing Trends

• The Internet of Things (IoT) has meant that seamless interoperability is expected. From a testing perspective, 2-factor authentication is becoming essential. 

• Given that IoT devices rely on synchronised data sets to give a single view of status requires end-to-end testing to embrace multiple verification tests.

3. Performance and Security Testing

Today, we use almost 400 different laptop and mobile phone models. But the real question is how much they can perform as per the users' perspective and needs. The non-functional performance engineering methodology aligns with the agile and shift-left approaches to identify issues and enhance performance at an earlier software testing stage.

What Performance and Security Testing Trends

• Performance testing is no longer limited to the application, a microservice architecture requires more end-to-end journey testing

• Service providers guarantee auto-scaling to support increased transactional traffic, but the test trend is to stress applications at the edge of the scaling.

• Security testing is becoming more and more identity validation as more applications rightly lock down their credentials. The result is an ever-growing requirement to build testing personas as both good actors and bad actors

4. Agile Automation Testing

The business requirement to chase first mover advantage is increasing, and it is now recognised that having a regression suite is essential to orchestrate multiple weekly or, now, in many cases, daily deployments. 

This technique updates software in small chunks and frequently utilises an iterative method. Agile automation testing aims to increase the software development process's frequency while maintaining its quality, timeliness, and resource usage.

What are the Latest Trends in Agile Automation

• Risk-based rather than blanket coverage has returned as a trend.

• Breaking regression suites into sub suites,  covering critical tests, extending the reach of tests to test variations in multi-country implementations, standard integrations, and custom integrations.

• Test case reuse so that test results can highlight the different perspectives of the outputs across the unit, component tests, functional tests, code audit checks, accessibility, security, and non-functional tests

• Result transparency - test teams are no longer hidden behind developers transparent test results reporting are aiding business decisions

5. QAOps Testing Technique

Often now referred to as Shift Right testing, QAOps testing supports the infinity loop of operational testing.

 What is trending in QAOps Testing?

•  Automated ticket generation and bugs seen in Production are viewed as the failure of test coverage and should immediately treat as Priority 1 incidents

• Trend analysis, we have all seen flaky tests, but which are the important exceptions? A deeper analysis of flaky tests can positively affect the overall quality.

• Greater business  involvement in mitigating business risks, often by reviewing reports and prioritising actions

6. Visual Regression Testing

Visual regression testing is the part of automated testing that allows us to go beyond functional testing, and explore deeply the visual aspects of the application. As a tester, we use automated testing tools to identify the visual bugs between the different versions of a software application UI. With this testing, you can compare and analyse the screenshots and images of the webpage and applications across various builds or releases to identify any unintended visual changes.

In addition, you can also detect the visual discrepancies on these webpages and UI applications such as layout shifts, CSS issues, missing elements, misalignments, broken images, font and colour changes, and unexpected content alterations.

What is Trending in Visual Regression Testing 

• Visual regression testing can find the visual bugs at the early stages of the development process by integrating them into the CI/CD pipeline. 

• With this testing, you can ensure the UI maintains a uniform appearance across different web browsers, devices, and screen dimensions.  

• This testing works perfectly in an agile environment and ensures the current and previous releases of the business operations work perfectly.

• Testers can maintain the visual test effectively by treating visual tests in a similar manner as programming code. As this testing involves the implementation of the software practices like version control and code reviews.  

• Automation Regression testing accelerates the testing process and shortens the testing lifecycle.

• By including visual regression testing into your existing automation framework, you(Tester) can expand test coverage to include the visual aspect of the application.

These are a few trending testing techniques that are being used nowadays. These techniques not only save your time but also deliver qualitative results on time.

7. AI and ML in Automation Testing

All businesses have to navigate the minefield of AI; at this stage, when vendor claims are analysed in detail, AI is often no better than Machine Learning (ML). It is too early even to contemplate that AI could replace the creation of well-structured test cases, but with enhanced ML, there will be improved automation based on statistical risk, which may optimise test performance and confidence.

What are the trends in AI and ML in Testing

• Venture Capital is making large investments to try and realise the vision of automated test generation and execution.

• Machine learning is already identifying and optimising common roots allowing basic tests to explode multiple threads to test complex functions.

• Machine learning helps eliminate flaky tests by looking at contextual changes caused by minor code variations and facilitating automated retests.

• ML trend analysis aids prioritisation and reduces business risk.