Software Testing Trends That Will Rule 2021

The concept of Quality Assurance emerges from the Middle Ages. In the traditional era, royal families purchased materials to build ships and preferred managers or professionals to obtain the quality of products. Nowadays, people prefer to choose quality assurance companies for software testing because they allow them to fulfil the unique needs of customers and 99.9% satisfy the industry’s requirements of the application or software.   

User Experience is at the forefront of development. Internal transformations like Test Process Standardization and Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) Setup require less demand of testing, which is now integrated more with digital transformation programs in the post-COVID-19 world to help clients focus on business continuity with strategic planning, including allowing them to choose automation and offshoring solutions to minimize their business spending and focus on the improvement of cost-saving programs.   

The COVID-19 pandemic situation has amplified software development issues for IT companies. In addition, the sudden announcements of lockdowns pushed organizations to be more predictive and business-centric. For example, Logistics services are high in demand due to sudden lockdown periods because daily sources are necessary for everyone and help people meet their daily requirements via digital applications. Therefore, it becomes vital for QA companies to maintain quality assurance for logistic applications that deal with the distribution of goods and services and transportation areas.   

The Purpose of QA in logistics is to assure that the software or product is rigorously tested against the functionalities and features involved in its business requirements. Ensuring effective management of the end-to-end process for all operations is one of the biggest responsibilities of the testing companies nowadays because the majority of professionals are working from homes, and their teams are separated from ever. By following the remote working standards, enterprises need to test consistently to ensure high-quality releases for better digital experiences. Moreover, simultaneously working as per the digital trends becomes the major concern of software testing service providers to help customers get the best store/platform/branch/mobile or cross-channel experiences.   

However, with remote teams working from home, it becomes challenging to offer an exceptional online experience to users because most software testing companies are unable to have access to their on-site labs. Industries are using on-demand distributed testing solutions to fulfill 24/7 customer requirements. Moreover, this type of QA testing help testers gets a real-world view of their website and mobile apps & makes it easy for them to get quick feedback from users. In 2021, one of the QA problems that companies must resolve is how to enable teams to produce more quality and outputs faster while ensuring performance is improved.   

Due to significant shifts in the political environment and the market uncertainty driven by the pandemic, 2021 will be the year of agility and speed in Software Testing. Before COVID-19, technological forces and businesses already requested organizations to manage changes and make decisions faster, and the pandemic has significantly intensified those changes and requirements. Companies that never had a habit of bearing too much pressure before, are now adopting digital trends and practices. They are also working on new business models that fit the changing needs. The need for speed won’t be temporary because digitization, automation, globalization, analytics, and other factors of change will continue to accelerate.  

The software testing company should be more focused while performing testing on applications. Their test practices should be effective enough to discover more bugs and defects from products and applications before delivering them to the client. They should take care of the quality details and thoroughly check the software to ensure that it is more reliable, secure, easy to use, and help them fulfil their needs with different features present in it. The Best Software Testing Company will leverage next-gen technologies like Automation and Artificial Intelligence in 2021 to improve decision-making capabilities for businesses, which want to give immense satisfaction to their customers for varied products and services. Companies will go digital and use modern technologies to speed up their business operations and improve profitability.   

So, what Software Testing Trends can you expect to be more popular in 2021? To help you understand top software testing trends in 2021, we have prepared a guide that includes different software testing areas from Artificial Intelligence in Testing, Big Data Testing, Continuous Testing, Regression Testing, Accessibility Testing, Chatbots, and many more.   

Just make up in your mind that these mentioned Software Testing Trends for 2021 can vary according to their working & features. In addition, their common stages for testing can also differ according to their type. Usually, when it comes to getting Software Testing Services, most people demand Functional Testing & Non-Functional Testing, including Unit Testing, System Testing, Integration Testing, Sanity Testing, Interface Testing, Smoke Testing, Performance Testing, Beta Testing, Localization Testing, Stress Testing, Load Testing, Usability & Compliance Testing. On the flip side, we will talk about specific testing types in our list of the Best Software Testing Trends for 2021 that you can discover below.  

Software Testing Trends to Watch Out in 2021  

Artificial Intelligence in Testing   

These days, people are running in a rat race to understand how brain functions can be replicated wholly or partially. As per this study, the AI market’s value will surpass the U.S. $100 billion from 2021 to 2026. In the future, corporate sectors can be more dependent on Artificial Intelligence to augment human potential, improve efficiency, and optimize their business processes.   

It is one of the top Software Testing Trends that you can watch out in 2021, as AI-based testing platforms help organizations minimize the complexities while testing with AI, machine learning, and natural processing implementations. Companies are focused on developing AI capabilities to improve software testing performance at all stages of the QA lifecycle.  

 Machine learning and AI-based Quality Assurance are powered by supervised and unsupervised methods to unleash the power of data such as project documentation, test artefacts, defect logs, test results, production incidents.   

 AI aids in optimizing the testing process and allows for the prediction of failure points, making it ideal for lowering total costs and increasing customer satisfaction.  

 Big Data Testing   

Companies are leveraging Big Data Programs to run data analytic solutions, which require a robust strategy to perform end-to-end testing in optimum test environments. However, performing end-to-end testing in the right way is another significant challenge that one needs to be addressed carefully to ensure successful implementation.   

Big Data Testing provides end-to-end testing solutions for data acquisition and data analytics testing. For big data testing, it is feasible for companies to use robust tools with Big Data utilities to automate the tasks of Big Data Validation.  

 Sectors like banking, healthcare, finance, retail, and telecommunication continuously deal with Big Data. As per the study of Statista, the global big data market is estimated to reach the U.S. $103 billion by 2027. Thus, we can expect that Big Data will make a new move in software testing trends.   

Continuous Testing   

The objective of continuous-based testing solutions is to help organizations produce quality software at a faster pace and help them adopt the Agile & DevOps theme, like standardize, improve, accelerate, and elevate. Continuous testing requires the holistic approach and the best Agile & DevOps knowledge to help customers acquire delight through shift-left in the quality process, incremental development, and rapid deployment of features into production.   

One can have a centralized platform for continuous testing and easy to build CI-CD pipelines with scriptless methods to integrate automated build and deployments, static code analysis, compliance checks, and other types of testing.   

Before giving continuous delivery of software, companies need to ensure quality audits, processes and procedures and should work strategically for the production, integration, and implementation process. Make sure continuous testing is not the same as automated testing, so you need to have expertise in strategic automation to perform this type of testing. One of the common pillars of continuous testing is code quality, customer experience, application quality, and pipeline automation. Other quality assurance activities that influence overall product quality can be involved in a continuous testing phase.   

Regression Testing   

Regression testing is one of the leading software testing trends in 2021 that is utilized to ensure that existing developed and tested software will continue to perform well after fixing new bugs or defects.   

When choosing the Best Software Testing Company, regression testing is effectively carried out when new features are added or new programs are changed in the application.   

Accessibility Testing   

With more companies shifting to digital, it becomes vital to make software accessible for all individuals, especially those who are dependent on digital services for online shopping, e-learning, e-banking, remote work, and virtual healthcare.    

Accessibility testing is a subtype of usability testing that assures that application being tested is used by people with hearing loss issues and other disabilities like colour blindness. Downloads of mobile applications surpassed 33.6 billion worldwide in the first quarter of 2020. Since the coronavirus outbreak, business and education application downloads have more than doubled.   

These applications are becoming a greater necessity and offer good accessibility features. Applications like video conferencing should be accessible for users taking education from homes and attending online meetings, classes, and managing other online activities.   

Chatbots Testing  

Chatbots are imperative to simulate human behaviour in the real world and hassle-free conversations. Every industry has multiple types of chatbots that they use for different purposes, such as medical chatbots, finance chatbots, and banking chatbots.   

Chatbots are capable of reducing customer support costs up to 30% and even able to answer nearly 80% of routine questions of customers. Chatbots can speed up response times and are cost-effective. That’s why industries today are using chatbots at breakneck speed. Quality from a usability and functionality viewpoint is crucial and will become the major element to achieve the industry’s success. Chatbot features differ according to the industry type. Therefore, testing for chatbots can also vary. Yet, two factors play a great role most of the time from the testing end – the degree of intelligence and the conversational ability of the Chatbot that users are expecting from it.   

Chatbot testing ranges from security testing to performance testing and is needed to focus on activities like authentication, authorization, encryption of conversations, regulations, and adherence. So, chatbots are extremely useful, and we can expect that this will become one of the top software testing trends in 2021.  

Hyperautomation   

Hyperautomation applications rely on advanced techniques such as Artificial Intelligence, RPA, Process Mining, and Machine Learning to help employees gain their productivity and automate their operations in a more efficient way.   

Hyperautomation is the extension of legacy business process automation beyond the boundaries of individual processes. By combining Artificial Intelligence tools with RPA, Hyperautomation allows for repetitive tasks implemented by business users virtually.   

Gartner introduces the trend of Hyperautomation. Still, due to the COVID-19 crisis, many companies are planning to add Hyperautomation in their software testing services, and this will become one of the major software testing trends of 2021 due to its capabilities of discovering business processes dynamically and creating bots to automate them.   

DevTestOps   

DevTestOps is famous for delivering a reliable product and continuous monitoring activities that aim to improve the product's consistency and minimize the corporate’s risks.   

Some of the best software testing company prefers DevTestOps because it is a combination of continuous testing and DevOps. DevTestOps aims to give the experience of early testing, frequent testing, testing throughout the software delivery pipeline.   

To eliminate the possibility of business risks, missing defects, and functionalities, the idea of DevTestOps is introduced in continuous testing as a major part of the software delivery pipeline.   

DevTestOps highlights the importance of testers with Ops professionals in the product development process. According to DevTestOps, the software testing company incorporate the continuous testing process with CI/CD pipeline.   

DevTestOps covers a wide range of QA practices, a combination of operations, testing, and development processes to address cybersecurity challenges and produce the best business results.   

Blockchain Testing   

Bitcoin is highly used as a virtual currency. According to the research, Blockchain is a nascent technology that helps improve the functioning of financial transactions. Including Blockchain in the Software Testing Trends for 2021 is necessary to ensure smart contracts and fraud protection in the era of COVID-19.   

Companies which are best in offering Software Testing Services has Blockchain Testing Frameworks with Open-Source Tools, which they use to conduct performance and functional testing across several DLTs, on a various level of business-based blockchain applications. The Blockchain Testing Framework of the Best Software Testing Company supports multiple testing scenarios beginning with the unit testing, integration testing, system testing and include the performance testing aspects with tools like JMeter, Selenium, Caliper, Soap UI, Selenium for monitoring. The Blockchain Testing Framework can fulfil the testing needs and demands of Distributed Ledger Technologies that are unique for the execution part. The solution involves many testing scenarios like API testing, performance testing, functional testing, and smart contract level testing.   

Blockchain testing framework offers a standard set of metrics when performing testing on various application layers and different Distributed Ledger Technologies in the blockchain network layer, irrespective of their underlying implementation.   

Wrapping Up   

We are dwelling in the digital world where businesses are running through technologies; every business owner must understand the importance of QA and the latest Software Testing Trends for 2021 as new-age technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Hyperautomation, IoT, Blockchain have enormous potential to make the products fully-functional. Apart from that, performing testing according to different technologies is vital for software applications, especially if you want to boost customer satisfaction, inspire clients’ confidence, prevent catastrophic corporate emergencies, maintain excellent user experience, promote organizational efficiency and productivity.   

At BugRaptors, as a leading QA services provider company, we bring you all the experience necessary to drive your testing goals.