The new consumer demands nothing less than instant gratification. Need a cab? It’ll reach your location in 5 minutes. Hungry? Give the food tech app 24 minutes. Maybe less. Besides, digital services are seeing a large-scale adoption from consumers around the world, and COVID-19 has further accelerated this pace of adoption.
These trends leave no room for error or software failure anymore. Volume and accuracy drive business. Naturally, organizations commit to quality at scale and are therefore rendering software testing and engineering an essential enabler of their operations. This has ensured that quality engineering becomes an even more critical part of the development process, going from a standalone vertical to a horizontal enabler.
In this blog post, we discuss the trends that will further drive the rise of quality engineering in 2021.
1. The need for speed will be the key driver for quality
Test automation has become a major area of focus in QA in recent years. Automation enables high speeds in the testing process, thus powering lower time to market. This calls for higher agility and DevOps across organizations. Software changes fast now. New feature enablement, enhanced user experience demand this. DevTestOps will drive the faster deployment of these changes in software, once again reducing the time to market for enhanced features and UX improvements.
2. Connected devices will call for higher instances of IoT testing
Connected, smart appliances are on the rise and will continue to be so in the coming years. In fact, by 2025, it is expected that there will be more than 30 billion IoT connections, averaging almost four IoT devices per person. The proliferation of connected devices is driving the rise of IoT testing, with its cutting-edge technologies that test software in-built IoT devices. Beyond hardware challenges, IoT testing will also include compliance requirements, access management, hardware issues, among others, to test the seamless performance of connected devices.
3. New AI, ML RPA led testing skills will need to be acquired
With saving time, enhanced collaboration high on organizational agendas, AI, ML, RPA will no longer be good-to-have in testing processes. They will become mainstream and will be used to build entire QA environments and help enterprises scale with sustainability and stability. New skills will have to be acquired for these new standards of testing.
4. Testing for UX across devices
90% of consumers around the world use more than one device – from smartphones to smart TV, tablets to laptops. Naturally, apps and services will need to be tested across devices for performance. Interoperability will become a must-have, and organizations will further scale their multi-device, interoperability testing rapidly in 2021.
5. More cybersecurity testing in the face of increasing cyber threats
Cyber-attacks are costing organizations and consumers significant amounts of money. 68% of business leaders globally feel that their cybersecurity risks are increasing. Naturally, cybersecurity testing is gaining momentum in the quality engineering space in order to ensure minimal costs and downtime in the occurrence of a threat event. Cybersecurity testing includes penetration testing and provides an in-depth understanding of an organization’s security posture. It identifies points of weakness that could invite threats into the system. Therefore, in the face of increasing cybersecurity incidents around the world, cybersecurity testing will gain even more prominence in 2021.
6. Performance Engineering will become part of organizational cultures
Performance engineering enables continuous, proactive testing of application performance. With loads increasing and UX demands on an all-time high, organizations will have no choice but to take on performance engineering head-on. Performance engineering enables QE teams to build accurate and effective performance metrics. In 2021, we foresee performance engineering becoming a matter of corporate culture. It will allow checking every section of systems and software and delivering business value through quality.
Which trends do you foresee driving QE in your organization? Reach out to us at [email protected] or visit here to learn more.
