3 Trends in Test Automation

Automation is becoming a powerful tool in every industry. With the pace of development at breakneck speed, test automation is a big asset in deploying applications quickly. The volume and complexity of testing environments mean that machines are well-suited for the job, and a modern QA strategy is all about leveraging that automation effectively.

QASymphony recently surveyed testers and QA leaders at mid-size and large enterprises and found that a significant number of respondents expect to be making a big leap towards test automation in the next year: Almost half expect to be automating more than 50 percent in that time. The test automation tool landscape is growing more complex, and 83 percent of organizations are using open source tools. In traditional environments, testing gets completed at the end of a development cycle.

As more teams move toward a DevOps and continuous delivery model in which software is constantly in development, leaving testing until the end can be a huge liability. In the time between a project starting and going to testing, master files could have been changed thousands of times. Who knows what kinds of bugs can pop up over months of development?

This leads to either updates stuck in testing for far too long or deployments filled with bugs â neither of which is good. Thatâs where continuous testing comes in. Continuous testing starts at the beginning.

Each milestone along the way serves as a quality gate, baking in excellence at each stage of the software development process. As each phase clears, more testing happens as needed. Implementing continuous testing methodologies is already the biggest trend in test automation, but some organizations that embark on their DevOps journeys struggle with it.

Source: gitlab.com