In 2024, many test automation trends will change the way testing is done. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the top 10 trends in automated testing that are expected to shape the industry in the coming year.
Let’s explore!!
Hyper Automation
“Hyper” means “hyperactive or unusually active,” and without exaggerating its meaning, “Hyper Automation” means active automation.
End-to-end process automation using technologies like RPA, AI, ML, NLP, and others has been making its way into the industry for some time.
Industries are highly interested in adopting hyper-automation in all their processes as it helps them reduce manual efforts and save a huge amount of time and money in the long run.
For example, Since 2016, the large IT company WIPRO has been insisting on using hyper-automation for all processes in its company.
Hyper Automation is the technology trend to watch in 2023, according to Gartner. It allows organizations to create their digital twins (a term coined by Gartner).
If you haven’t already, now is a good time for automation professionals to explore the tools and technologies used to enable superior automation.
Automate IoT Testing
Technology is gradually expanding its influence to facilitate human life in all areas of life. The Internet of Things or IoT is an example.
Here, multiple types of mechanical and digital objects are assigned unique identifiers and enable them to transmit data over the network without any human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
The goal of the Internet of Things is to dramatically improve the lives of its users, but such great innovations also come with great responsibility.
The challenge with the Internet of Things is ensuring that it works properly in any environment. In addition, great attention must be paid to privacy and security, because any omission can lead to serious problems.
Automate Independent Testing
According to Gartner, “autonomous things” will become a trend. Just as 2023 will be an eventful year for self-driving things. In the test automation industry, test automation will be performed independently.
Autonomy, in terms of automated testing, means the ability to create and execute test cases without human intervention. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are the technologies used to achieve this.
An example of an independent test automation tool is test.ai, which uses AI bots to test user experience and report issues without any human intervention.
DevTestOps
DevOps has been around for about a decade and has become an important automation process that allows organizations to quickly and efficiently deploy changes to a production system.
To ensure that quality is maintained between all these deployments, continuous testing is now combined with DevOps, resulting in DevTestOps. DevTestOps strives to ensure that system changes are implemented in production not only without delay but also without any compromise in quality.
Recent research shows that lower mean time to repair (MTTR) in manufacturing corresponds to increased customer satisfaction.
Moving to a low MTTR level means improvement in all three categories: testing process, efficiency, and tools. This is where effective DevTestOps will play an important role. Hence, DevTestOps is expected to become one of the test automation trends in 2023.
Multiple Experimental Tests
According to Gartner, multi-user experiences will be the future of app development.
“Development platform providers are expanding their value propositions beyond mobile and web application development to meet user and industry needs,” said Jason Wong, research vice president at Gartner.
“The result is the emergence of feature-rich development platforms used to develop chat, voice, augmented reality, and mobile devices.” Wearable to support digital business.
Now more than ever, companies are focusing on launching their products on different types of devices, including wearables and augmented reality devices, allowing users to experience products in different ways.
The mixed reality market is expected to witness significant growth in the future.
This is certainly an evolving trend, but testing must keep up to maintain uncompromising quality. Thus, in 2023, testers will be using multidisciplinary tests and looking for ways to automate this testing.
Democratize Automated Testing
There are now many ways to democratize testing, and this trend is expected to grow. There are two trends to pay attention to here:
- Crowdsourcing testing
- Convenient automation tools
With the advent of multi-user development, the number of devices required for simple development testing has increased dramatically.
Since the markets are global and each product is released in multiple countries, it is necessary to conduct testing on a large number of devices by different people. This is where crowdsourced testing comes in very handy.
The democratization of automated testing is also on the rise. Thanks to technologies like NLP (natural language processing), artificial intelligence, and machine learning, automation is possible with a very low learning curve.
Automated testing is now doable and understandable for people even if they have little knowledge of traditional automation.
It also allows other team members, including developers, project managers, product managers, and stakeholders, to participate in test automation as needed.
Scriptless testing tools pave the way for the democratization of automated testing.
Automation Through Distributed Cloud
Many commercial testing tools such as Saucelabs, and TestComplete offer to store automated test cases in the cloud to become a complete test suite.
The only issue that may bother its users sometimes is the delay they face in running the test and displaying the results due to cloud hosting in a remote location.
The cloud computing trend is expected to grow even better with the shift to distributed cloud in 2023.
Here, content hosted in the cloud can be accessed from a nearby cloud instead of a fixed cloud location, which increases the speed and efficiency of executing hosted test cases and retrieving results.
Automation to Improve AI Security
The introduction of hyper-automation and autonomous objects will certainly make operations super efficient, but the biggest challenge will be security.
The vast majority of automation done for hyper-automation and autonomous tasks will be done through AI. So, in 2024, testing and automation will also need to focus on the security of these AI-powered processes to ensure they are safe and secure for everyone to use.
Fast and Reliable Test Automation
Traditionally, test automation has faced some common problems:
- The big learning curve to understand test automation.
- Automation takes longer compared to testing.
- Automated test cases prove to be unreliable.
Testers and organizations have been looking for tools that can solve the above problems, as well as new technologies available to solve these problems, such as NLP, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and autonomous objects.
In 2024, organizations will start using such tools to improve the quality and reliability of test automation.
Test Automation to Improve Flexible Working
Although there are people who predict the death of Scrum, the Agile methodology that became synonymous with Agile about a decade ago, Agile with different methodologies is still popular and used by 97% of software development organizations around the world.
Since then, properly integrating automation into Agile methodology has become a challenging task, and organizations are trying to develop tools that can help in making Agile as automation-friendly as possible.
With the rapid adoption of AI and machine learning across the board, these tools will also see widespread adoption in 2024 and are expected to remain a test automation trend.
