Automation testing has emerged as an essential component of application development, enabling organizations to test applications effectively, easily, and accurately. Automating repeated tests has many benefits, such as lower costs and time, quicker release cycles, greater test coverage, enhanced accuracy, scalability, and capacity to manage complicated testing scenarios.
Effectively utilizing automation testing tools, enables organizations to enhance the quality and reliability of their applications while optimizing their testing efforts.
With the rapid changes, intense competition, and advancement in technology automation is constantly evolving. These digital transformations are influencing the future of automation testing which appears to be brighter than ever.
Therefore it is important to explore the new and emerging trends and innovations in the world of automated testing to stay up-to-date with industry trends, and continuously changing testing needs. Emerging trends that will affect automation testing in the future involve shift-left testing, cloud-based testing, cross-browser and cross-platform testing, artificial intelligence and machine learning through multiple integrations, and the increasing need for automated testing in agile and DevOps environments.
This article will explore some of the trends and innovations in shaping the future of automation testing. Exploring these trends will help overcome testing challenges, embrace continuous improvement, and enhance testing capabilities. Before we move to the topic it is crucial to first understand what the future of automation is, and what drives changes in the future of test automation. So let’s get started.
Future of automation
Automation is currently revolutionizing the IT industry’s operations because of recent technological advancements. Interest and concerns have been increasing in the topic as machines have become more intelligent, flexible, reliable, and autonomous, and are taking over more jobs and tasks that were once performed by humans.
Over the past decade, this trend and the effects of automation have changed at an incredibly rapid pace, and in the years to come, they will likely have a significant impact. Combining robotics, machine learning, and AI, many jobs can be automated, virtualized, and simplified. It includes everything from manufacturing and transportation to healthcare and finance.
Automation takes care of repetitive and tedious tasks, reduces the chances of working and messing up with human error, user interactions that require instant responses, and many more. In short, it is the future of all operations. Saying this does not mean that humans will be completely replaced, but it will surely change the nature of work and require workers to adapt to new roles and responsibilities.
What makes changes in the future of test automation?
Building a stable position in the testing industry creating and delivering high-quality applications is essential. However, building a successful application is quite a complex process. That is why organizations put automation testing into practice.
The future of test automation is about which organization will be able to follow new approaches and apply innovative automation testing tools to meet the changing needs and provide high-quality solutions.
Furthermore, it is mandatory to remember that test automation is not only about using the latest technology, but it is also about collaboration and communication among all the people involved in the process, well-defined test strategy, properly organized test management, and smooth CI/CD workflow.
Keeping that in mind, it is crucial to survey test automation trends, identify which one works for the current need, and make sure that it will lead to success.
There are a variety of forces that push organizations to respond to the changes.
Below are some forces that shape the future of test automation:
- A need to put test automation in the center of changes to ensure everything works correctly.
- A need to do things quickly, so that testers won’t have to wait longer for results. Cloud computing makes it easier to do lots of tests simultaneously.
- A need to change test automation tools to test and validate that applications work correctly, and to avoid loopholes in the process. AI and ML technologies make testing things faster, easier, and more accurate.
- When there is a need to ensure that the code changes do not cause any new problems or mess up anything that worked before, to attain the desired results.
- A need to make writing tests easier so that they won’t break later on.
- A need to find more cost-effective, and flexible solutions.
Emerging trends and innovations in automation testing
Cloud-based testing
Due to the efficiency, scalability, and affordability cloud-based testing is increasingly becoming popular. When quality assurance engineers opt for cloud-based infrastructure they get access to a multitude of testing environments, tools, and a wide range of devices without any investment in infrastructure. This technique benefits organizations that need to test across several locations and time zones.
When collaborating in the cloud-based environment, developers and testers can use their apps across the most modern devices and platforms in a hassle-free manner. Cloud testing offers distinct advantages, which include cloud scalability allowing development and testing teams to increase or decrease IT resources as needed to meet changing requirements. This means they will only pay for the resources they use. Using cloud-based testing test teams can connect in real time, accurately fix bugs, work more efficiently, and give feedback faster.
Continuous testing
To meet their evolving application needs organizations simply cannot rely on traditional testing methods and therefore adopt an automated approach to start testing much earlier in the project lifecycle so that they can eliminate QA backlog and release new applications and innovations more quickly.
Continuous testing aims to provide organizations with risk feedback of quality as quickly as possible. It allows the QA team to redefine its strategic role in the organization. This testing is meant to happen with each new change or build and it can be integrated with CI/CD tools which will help in responding to increasing user’s expectations with the need for high quality and speed, enabling scalability, enhanced user experience, and fast time-to-market.
Automation can be scheduled to execute after every build compilation, and test reports can be sent after every build. Thus, releasing builds will be easier in the future, with feedback available after every new check-in.
Exploratory testing
As technology advances, many strive for test automation where most of the test cases will be automated. However, effective and non-automated testing will always be needed. If any feature that is pending automation yet needs to be tested can be tested via exploratory testing. If incorporated effectively, this can significantly change the future of testing and brings a range of benefits.
In exploratory testing, testers are free to test the application. Compared to traditional testing approaches this type of testing is less time-consuming and fits the current accelerated delivery cycles.
However, one should not only rely on exploratory testing to test the application. Instead, deploy exploratory testing with other testing methods to take the most out of testing efforts and improve results.
Cross-browser cross-platform testing
The days have passed when developers used to write different codes for different devices and browsers. With advancements in technology and with the increasing number of devices and platforms, automating the testing processes across multiple browsers and testing environments has become increasingly crucial.
Cross-browser and cross-platform testing enables test teams to test their web apps seamlessly across various devices, browsers, and operating system combinations and deliver high-quality applications. This results in reduced expenses and faster test execution. Additionally, it will ensure that apps are compatible with a diverse range of devices and platforms.
Microservices testing
Microservices testing will be the next big trend due to its unique features that include flexibility, reusability, and ease of reuse. Microservices architecture allows development teams to create applications as a suite of small autonomous components; hence developers don’t need to deploy the whole stack at once if any change or update is required.
Simply when testing, it enables teams to test each service individually and its functional pieces, monitor the ongoing performance, etc. Thus, in the future, microservices testing seems to be the skill that will be in high demand.
Scriptless test automation
Codeless test automation is considered to be the next highlighted area in future automation testing as it requires a minimum learning curve and is easier to use. Testers and developers can start automating test cases without thinking about coding. This is the reason why more organizations are using scriptless test automation. It provides maximum automation coverage by allowing developers to uncover maximum bugs in the early stage of the application development life cycle.
NLP-based automation
NLP (Natural Language Processing) is one of the scriptless test automation trends. It aims to simplify the automation of test cases with the minimum learning curve, thus enabling users to use natural language to write the test steps. NLP allows testers, and developers involved in the test automation processes to develop, edit, manage, and automate test cases and integrate them into the application delivery pipeline. This results in increased test coverage and reduced resource costs.
Now most of the fields are using NLP to interact with humans, the test automation industry’s future is headed in the same direction.
AI-driven test automation
Utilizing artificial intelligence in testing can simplify the entire application development lifecycle. Now there are AI-powered tools on the market that can help in minimizing the tedious aspect of application development and testing while automating the whole testing process.
In the future of test automation, AI-based tools will be one of the most crucial trends that will enable the creation and maintenance of automated test cases with minimum effort by imitating test case writing style and allotting time-consuming and challenging maintenance processes to AI.
AI technology will enable testing systems to learn from previous test runs, recognize trends, and leverage that data to improve testing efficiency and accuracy, provide greater test coverage, prevent errors across a variety of testing activities, and many more. This technology can assist in detecting issues early on, thereby minimizing the time and effort required to address them.
Exploring the potential of LambdaTest in shaping the future of automation testing
With all the latest trends and innovations in automation testing, like AI and machine learning, cloud-based testing, exploratory testing, and integration with CI/CD tools, utilizing the LambdaTest platform seems to be the best option in shaping the future of test automation. LambdaTest is a comprehensive test automation platform that supports web, mobile, and API testing and popular frameworks such as Selenium, Cypress, Playwright and Puppeteer to ensure compatibility and functionality. It also offers a range of benefits helping organizations streamline their testing processes without compromising on quality.
This platform supports multiple programming languages and facilitates continuous integrations and continuous delivery processes by automating the building, testing, and deployment of the application.
LambdaTest is an AI-powered test orchestration and execution platform that allows running both manual and automated testing of web and mobile applications at scale. The platform offers testers access to more than 3000 environments, real devices, and browsers to perform both real-time and automation testing.
Additionally, LambdaTest provides a record and playback feature to record user interactions which can be later run as automated tests. It also has a built-in recording and debugging tool that facilitates early bug detection, faster feedback, improved collaboration, and increased test coverage. In short, using this platform test team can boost testing efficiency, and enhance the test execution process and overall application quality.
Conclusion
In the field of technology automation testing is changing fast with new tech, methods, and tools, and in the future it appears to be even stronger, and more critical to make sure applications work properly. Therefore to stay up to speed with these innovative trends organizations need to invest in the right tools and technologies to keep up with these trends and stay ahead of in the increasingly competitive software development industry
