Top trends for Testing and Quality Assurance

1. QA and Testing Budgets Continue to Rise
   According to a recent study, 52% of QA and testing spend was allocated to new development projects in 2016, compared to 30% in 2015. QA and testing teams will continue to spend more budget on new development projects and initiatives. It is also worth mentioning that the trend of outsourcing testing projects has slowed and will continue to do so, as more and more companies are embracing internal only testing processes and investing in internal test teams more and more. Organisations are now looking at a mixed resource model of onsite test consultants and internal staff.
2. Agile Testing
   Agile testing is more common now. Every company has some level of agile testing, especially in the mobile space. The projects using this type of testing are driven by fast paced and responsive testing solutions, which are integrated into the agile development methods.In an effort to go to market faster, factors like “not enough time to test” are no longer valid. Teams are leaning towards automation in an effort to reduce times to go to market and be ahead of the competition.Agile scrum is very different from the traditional method, in which one worked on a long project where there was little feedback and seldom any concept of when it was supposed to end. Agile scrum leads to better collaboration, which means that testing, IT and business teams work more closely together, rather than being at ‘war’ with one another. This makes it much easier to see the impact of what is being done immediately, which ultimately means one can serve the client faster.
3. Continuous Delivery
   Continuous delivery is also now being heavily incorporated. Companies no longer want to wait for 18 months before going live; rather, they want a constant flow of updates—sometimes daily—around new features. This is challenging for testers, as such an approach keeps them on their toes at all times.Under this methodology, testing is done in small increments in a production-like environment, with code integration happening at frequent intervals. This kind of testing helps the tester to detect problems early, measure the effectiveness of a change and determine whether it actually meets end-user expectations.
4. Mobile Mobile Mobile—More Focus on Mobile Testing
   Mobile devices have become a major part of many organisations’ digital development strategy, but many businesses lack the testing specialists, tools, and consistent methodology needed for effective mobile development. The explosion of mobile technologies in both the hardware and software fields will continue to demand a testing framework that is both comprehensive and nimble. The development lifecycle of mobile applications is relatively compact compared to a standard web application—almost 40 percent of organisations agree that time is a crucial factor for QA and testing teams. This highlights the importance of automation to perform regression testing.
   The overall focus of many organisations’ mobile testing efforts has proved to be on validating all aspects of a complete customer experience. This makes non-functional testing such as security, performance, customer experience even more important and relevant in the future.
5.  Mobile Cloud
   Cloud computing is becoming an increasing part of the IT mainstream. With about 26% of software applications hosted on cloud in 2016, IT professionals and experts see a positive growth in the adoption of cloud based testing. To deliver a high quality mobile application, testing is critical. Testing with real devices can quickly become disorganised and labor intensive if the testing environment is not conducive to creating, collecting and generating results in a consistent manner. More and more enterprises are exploring cloud-based testing tools in order to reduce project cost and increase ROI.

Conclusion
Quality Assurance & Testing is crucial and fulfills a critical role in any digital transformation journey. It’s essential for organisations that are dealing with a digital transformation to have an appropriate digital assurance strategy.