According to a report published by Gartner, “The worldwide software development spending is projected to grow by 8.2 percent in 2020 to a total of $466 billion.”
2020 is surely going to push the software development industry to greater altitudes. Therefore, the progress in all the software engineering domains, including software testing, is certain to observe the changes as well. Trends in Software development, including the testing processes, are expected to be more precise and advanced in 2020.
Software testing is the step where the actual results are scrutinized, evaluated, and revised to meet the demanded results from the beginning of the development. This involves administering the components of the software or a system to assess its performance and assure that it operates as required.
Have a look at these emerging software testing trends for the upcoming years:
Testing for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Past years’ data suggests that Machine learning and Artificial Intelligence will affect all the spheres of technological innovations in the upcoming years. AI is claimed to become the top investment priority of enterprises by 2020. In North America alone, the market for AI is predicted to be nearly $7 billion by 2020. Machine Learning will assist to enhance speech recognition and gesture recognition big time. The forecasts for various technological advancements based on AI and complex algorithms have transformed the vision of the future and these applications will require strict testing and validations too.
DevOps System for Test Automation
DevOps is not a new word in the software testing world. With the available advanced agile and DevOps methods, most businesses will continue to adopt test automation for faster and reliable releases in 2020 too. Unquestionably, test automation has already remodeled the software testing process to perform monotonous tasks fast and efficiently. With DevOps establishing proper collaboration between production departments, testing automation tools will continue to command the software testing ecosystem. DevOps adoption will assist businesses to deliver agile release cycles, reliable build quality, and faster ROI in 2020.
“According to a survey conducted by Statista, Only 9% of the survey participants said that they are not planning to include DevOps in their software development process in any way.”
Performance Engineering
The performance of a software development business is always very closely connected to the success of their software products. To enable the best balance, companies nowadays are going for the trend of follow-ups and feedbacks to calculate the performance of their product. This whole idea is based on the user approval and user-friendliness of the software. Hence, the center of the development is performance and usability.
The success of the software is evaluated in the terms of successful transactions within a defined time span, reducing the expenses of software maintenance and support, predicting and resolving bottlenecks that may occur later. The future efficiency of the software depends on the results of the performance assessment.
Performance testing has now emerged into Performance engineering and with the user approval being the top priority, you can definitely witness a growth of performance engineering in 2020 and beyond.
Internet of Things (IoT)
The number of smart devices is predicted to be increased to 20.8 billion by 2020. In the year 2016, this number was only 6.4 billion. This data reveals the rapid growth of the smart device industry and the increasing capabilities of IoT.
Every smart device that you know of is getting connected with the Internet of Things, then what is that one barrier that is stopping IoT from transforming our households? The answer is security concerns with IoT enabled devices among users. The Internet of Things will bring a whole new dimension in regular software testing. If businesses could combine security testing with the vast possibilities of IoT, 2020 can be the ultimate game-changer for the internet of things.
The amalgam of IoT and software testing will demand the following kind of testing dimensions:
- Safety evaluation (device availability, authenticity, and accuracy of authorization)
- Connection delay monitoring
- Data integrity testing
- Testing the compatibility of protocols and device versions
- Scalability testing
Big Data Testing to Empower Enterprises
Big data has played a crucial role in the development of numerous business industries, including banking, healthcare, technology, retail, media, telecom, and more.
Big data testing helps these businesses to process huge volumes of data and several data types. It also assists data scientists to derive better conclusions with specific data validations, while improving business strategies. Big data testing is not a new phenomenon in 2020. However, it is expected to rise exponentially as numerous industries are moving toward a data-driven world.
To sum it up
Software testing, like any other software development component, is conquering new heights with every passing year. Strict software testing is one of the best solutions for a lot of security failures the consumer world is afraid of. Manual testing is continuously being replaced by testing automation. In 2020 we will notice a positive combination of these two testing models, as there are not sufficient testing tools yet to completely automate data processing and monitoring. But in the upcoming years, we are likely to see the absolute replacement of manual testing with automated testing.
Ajeet Singh
