10 latest trends in Quality Assurance (QA) and Testing

By Pankaj Upadhyay, Associate Vice President, Key Relationships, Maveric Systems

In the current digitally ruled era, consumers are demanding improved connectivity and on-the-go access to information, which is compelling businesses, government and other public sector entities to be more agile and flexible while offering services and deliverables. The last few years have witnessed cross-border mergers, acquisitions, rapid adoption of social media platforms and rapid advancements in mobile and cloud technologies. Another major advancement that is transforming the way organizations interact with their customers, employees and partners, is Internet of Things or IoT.

Therefore, quality and reliability are being given greater attention, resulting in reduction of software application errors, improving security and application performance. Gone are the days when testing/assurance was not separated from the development/programming aspects of a technology adoption and the value that can be added to a project by an assurance specialist is being realized and is gaining support. Also, the move towards agile software development is also impacting testing like never before.

So, with this rapid digital take-over of most businesses and a shift towards achieving greater quality and reliability in a shorter span of time, let us take the time to spell out the 10 latest Trends in Quality Assurance (QA) and Testing :-

1. QA and Testing budgets will continue to rise, primarily driven by transformation projects
2.  Reports suggest that more than 40% of IT budgets will be devoted towards quality assurance and software testing
3. Testing budgets allocated for new software development initiatives is now slowly overtaking budgets that are usually allocated for software maintenance projects
4.  Testing Centers of Excellence (TCOE) continue to grow. From a mere 4% in 2011, operational TCOE models grew to 26% in 2015
5.  According to a report by Evoke Technologies on ‘Software Testing Trends and Predictions’, 27% of the organizations have already experimented with the concept of crowd-sourced testing
6.  2015 has been a year of SMAC Technologies i.e. Social media, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud technologies. Organizations are allocating major portion of their Testing budgets to cloud, big data & analytics and mobile
7. Agile Testing is growing in acceptance but is still yet to mature. As per the World Quality Report, 93% of organizations are using agile development methods compared to the 87% in 2013. However, many still face numerous challenges, the largest one being the lack of a suitable testing
8. There is increased focus on non-functional testing with new transformational programs, especially for Mobile testing. The 3 key aspects of customer experience are security, performance and ease-of-use
9. Higher Automation Levels, especially in mobile space, where every company has some level of Agile Testing, some following multiple releases a day. Traditional Scrum style ceases to suit these needs and Kanban methodology is used instead of extended sprint planning, retrospectives etc. Hence business is more demanding in terms of Automation as there is very little time to test
10. Newer technologies like SOA, cloud and mobile testing are on the rise. By 2015, experts predict that while almost 36% of software will be hosted on cloud, businesses still lack the necessary infrastructure for cloud testing. These might cause businesses to opt for TaaS (Testing as a service) options.

More and more businesses are awakening to the need of a well-designed and futuristic quality assurance process to maintain their edge in the industry. Organizations are looking for Testing Partners with specialist QA service that can help them readily adapt to the latest trends in testing. Testing centric organizations have a clear advantage and should build their service stack to cater to the latest customer needs and market trends as highlighted in this study