Testing is an indispensable part of any software development project as it helps you find the flaws in your creation. Based on the test results, you can make small tweaks to ensure the usability, compatibility and security features are all perfect. With the advancement in programs and software like Rapise from Inflectra, software testing has become easier but still vital to any software development. Software testing is a time consuming process and several things need to be checked before launching the product in the market. In fact, according to Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), software development firms all over the world invest more than $50 billion in testing and quality assurance every year. Some other statistics show that the annual growth rate of software testing investment is 15.4% and in coming 2 years, the expense for testing alone will reach $19.3 billion dollars.
Let's take a look at the popular software testing trends of 2013.
#1.Mobile Application Testing
The number of cell phone users is growing rapidly every year and more people are adopting smartphones or tablets to enjoy a variety of applications. There are more than 700,000 thousand apps on App Store and Play Store each and that simply indicates the popularity of lightweight software that can run on phones or tabs. People are willing to pay a few dollars to manage their corporate tasks or get entertained with the help of apps. Some of these apps use users' data to fetch necessary information while some utilize the benefits of cloud computing to communicate with the ERP systems. Data security is a major concern for such apps as any leaked banking or personal information can damage end users financially and also spoil the brand name of the app vendor. The biggest challenge of mobile app testing is that an app can be available on multiple OS platforms such as iOS, Blackberry and Android. Thus, functionality testing and integration testing are absolutely must to make sure that the custom app is safe for users.
#2.Testing as a Service
Research shows that TaaS is gaining huge popularity among software development firms. While software development companies are hiring the best talents to create customized, revolutionary solutions for their customers, they are not willing to spend money and time on testing. In order to reduce cost and dedicate more time for development, some software development firms are utilizing the test environment offered by TaaS providers.
#3.Cross Cloud Testing
Not many testing has been done so far to standardize the data formats and communication patterns among different cloud platforms. Standardization of communication pattern among clouds will keep the data secure and help developers run apps that can run on different cloud systems. In this year, more and more testers will engage in testing apps over cross cloud execution.
#4.Business Intelligence Testing
How do you determine how efficient a business software is? Good software not only analyzes vast amount of data, but also gives meaningful options to its user to dig out real time data and recognize the key trends. Therefore, software testers will be more interested to check the intelligence of a business application and their test results will help developers create a solution that will provide real time solutions to business owners.
#5.Crowd Source Testing
It's a growing trend and freelancers are welcoming this trend all over the world. Crowd source software testing helps application development firms save thousands of dollars, because the testers charge considerably less amount of money for their service. However, it's not intelligent to fall for this trend because crowd sourcing is not good for quality maintenance.
#6.Client-Side Performance
In coming days we need to focus browser performance testing as well as server performance testing. Client side testing is an entirely automated process. It uses web browsers to evaluate end user experience, in terms of both static and dynamic metrics.
#7.Exploratory Testing
It's certainly beneficial in the software testing phase. In 2013, software developers are adapting agile development techniques and thus, it's the ideal time to go for exploratory testing in order to deliver faster results and reduce development time.
#8. Data Driven Testing
As for test automation, data driven testing has already been a relevant topic. Get rid of from small set of data sets and make it wide and flexible. It allows one script to test application functionality with several sets of data.
#9.Database Support
Now this is something new in test automation field and major tools fail to provide database integration. This integration if made available would really be helpful to test database entries using simple queries. It can be also said as a part of security testing.
These are some of the popular trends so far. We are only halfway through 2013 and hopefully lots of new testing trends will become popular in the coming months.
Prashant Chambakara is a technology and software testing enthusiast. He is working with TestingWhiz, a new generation automated testing tool for web applications. He is sharing his knowledge and expertise on test automation. You can also connect to him on twitter at @PChambakara.
