Back in the old days, software testing was just about finding errors in a product. The goal being – to improve product quality. But nowadays, the range of software testing has broadened. When it comes to software testing, automation testing has always been in the vanguard. Going by the latest automation testing trends, the software testing industry is expected to evolve even more than in the last decade.

As per the MarketsAndMarkets report, the global automation testing market size is expected to grow by USD 28.8 billion by 2024. To keep up with the pace of the ever-changing landscape of testing, you should be familiar with the latest automation testing trends.

In this post, we will discuss the top automation testing trends that you must look out for in 2021.

Shift Left and Shift Right Approach

With the rise of shift left approach testers started writing test cases just after the requirement was clear, and development continued parallelly with testing. However, the shift right approach focuses on testing, monitoring, and updating the app in production environments, rather than completely handling the product’s responsibility to the Ops team,

But, using the shift right approach doesn’t mean you should focus less on shift left. Both approaches go hand in hand. Shift left helps you to create a better development path so that fewer bugs are caught after development. While shift right is about creating a plan that allowed the team to continue testing after the product has a user base. Thus leading to better user acceptance testing and real-time load and performance testing.

The shift right approach is one of the latest automation testing trends that will become more prevalent in 2021.

Cloud-Based Cross Browser Testing

Gone are the days when developing a website meant you have to make it responsive for a specific mobile, tab, and desktop. Nowadays, most companies and customers prefer a site developed in the mobile-first approach. At present, there are hundreds of devices in the market, each with its own resolution and browsers. It’s quite costly to set up such a huge testing infrastructure. That is why most companies and individuals have started moving towards cloud-based cross browser testing frameworks.

2021 will see an increasing demand in the use of such frameworks. It’s time for you to become a part of such automation testing trends. And, if you are using a framework like LambdaTest, you can seamlessly test your web application across hundreds of device-OS-browser combinations. And it’s not about manual UI testing. You can execute Selenium automation testing as well.

Role of Automation in Risk Compliance and Security Testing

Data security and compliance is a huge thing to look out for a while developing a product in 2021. Remember the incident that happened with Facebook? Government regulations are in place that restricts the usage of a customer’s data by a company. For example, if you are developing a product in the EU, you must comply with Global Data Privacy Regulations or GDPR. You have to follow other privacy laws based on the nature of the product you are developing. For example, if you are developing an app meant for usage in the medical domain, you must follow HIPAA. But how does it impact testing? Not only that, what role does automation play in it?

The bad news, you can no longer use a customer’s real data to test real-time scenarios.

The good news, there are alternatives. There are tools like Chef.io that scan your software system and find out if there is any test data that is not in compliance with a certain data security standard.

You can also use an automated test management tool like Datprof or EMS Data Generator that helps you with data masking or synthetic test data generation. The generated test data simulates a real user’s data. You can use that to test your application while complying with privacy laws.

At the same time, you must check that the customer’s data is completely safe from breaches or hacks. Carry out security audits, educate your employees, and arrange security and compliance training to prevent an unfortunate lawsuit.

The role of automation in risk compliance and security is one of the most prominent automation testing trends to look for in 2021.

AI-Powered Automation Testing Tools

Automation testing is aimed towards reducing manual efforts for repetitive processes like regression testing. But, even writing the test cases and scripts requires manual effort. Since customers nowadays want a faster delivery, how can we reduce even a tiny bit of manual effort? The latest and the most powerful concept of artificial intelligence comes with a solution.

The most significant advantage that AI-powered tools provide is – ease of maintenance. They have the ability to heal better. These tools constantly monitor the code and look for changes or patterns. Once they find out any change in the application, the tool modifies the test script accordingly. Tools like TestCraft and Testim use machine learning and AI to authorize, execute, and maintain automated tests. Looking at their acceptance, they are going to be highly popular automation testing trends of 2021. Thus in the future, even when your application is growing large with thousands of test cases, you have no need to worry about maintaining or modifying your scripts. AI will do the job for you.

Selenium and Codeless Automation

Selenium is already the most popular tool for automated testing of web applications. It will continue to maintain its popularity since:

• It is free to use and open source
• Supports multiple browsers and operating systems
• Supports multiple languages like C#, Python, Java, Perl, PHP, and Ruby
• The IDE has tools that help you to debug, record, or edit the test cases.

But with the growing popularity of AI and ML, a change is coming to Selenium in 2021. Both Machine learning and AI aims to provide alternate means of repetitive and error-prone tasks. Testcraft and many other tools are already in this domain. Powered by Selenium and AI, these automation tools provide codeless automation testing support. With such latest trends in automation testing, testers can now automatically generate a self-healing Selenium code. As I have discussed earlier, AI-powered tools can easily detect a change in the application and modify the script. With these tools, testers will no longer need to worry about test case maintenance.

Performance Testing of IoT Based Apps

The usage of IoT devices is growing to a huge extent. With more users purchasing smart interconnected devices, new business opportunities will continue to replace the old solutions in 2021. Since the job of IoT devices is to simplify the everyday task of a user, if you are developing an IoT app, you must take special care of performance testing. Trust me on this, a user will not think twice before uninstalling your app if it fails to turn on the smart light of his home instantly after he orders Google Assistant or Alexa.

With the increasing number of IoT devices and apps, companies and developers will focus on their products’ performance testing. Thus, going by the latest trends in automation testing, 2021 we will see a boom in the use of tools like IoTIFY, MATLAB and Simulink, and other simulators. These tools ease the life of developers. How? Simulating real-time prototypes and checking how much optimized the apps are to handle the load of multiple devices and commands.

Impact of Robotic Process Automation on Test Automation

The role of RPA is evolving in the automation testing domain. At present, RPA has cleared its importance by replacing manual effort in load, regression, and performance testing. With RPA in place, testers can now focus on usability and exploratory testing. In 2021, the use of RPA will be made formal in large-scale applications, and will be among high impacting automation testing trends. By implementing RPA, companies can benefit by providing:

• A better quality and well-maintained product, leading to better customer service.
• Become more efficient in digitizing process data.
• Reduce the cost by decreasing the need for manual effort.
• Ensure that business processes comply with the necessary standards and regulations.

Including QAOps in your Test Management Tool

Almost all companies follow the CI/CD approach nowadays. DevOps bridges the communication gap between the development and Ops team. But, QA is an important part of CI/CD. QA teams must not work in silos. QAOps has started becoming a trend, as it is bridging the gap between QA and other teams. But, what are the steps for succeeding in QAOps?

• Developers should start writing unit tests.
• Ops team should help to identify UX problems in a production environment.

Only then, Dev, Ops, and QA teams will collaborate. Thus, giving stakeholders complete viability into the QA process.

In the DevOps age, QAOps has drawn a bit of attention to the challenges QA teams were facing in the past years. 2021 will see the evolution of test management tools. The tools need to be more flexible and ready to support QAOps. If your aim is to build a successful team that follows both DevOps and QAOps, the test management tool that you are choosing should focus more on:

• Use of automation.
• Help in test development.
• Focus on API and performance testing.
• Support integration with build and version control tools.

Use of Automated Tools for Blockchain Applications

In 2019, by blockchain technology, the only thing that came to our mind was bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. But currently, the scope of blockchain technology has grown a lot. Also, it is used for food, shipping, supply chain management, and other industries. This is because – blockchain provides the highest level of security for any financial transaction.

In 2021, the demand for QA experts with specific domain knowledge of blockchain app testing will increase, and will be among the top automation testing trends to look for. That being said, apart from domain knowledge, testing professionals should have some knowledge of automated tools. There are popular tools like Ethereum tester or Exomum Testkit. With the help of these tools, you can test the execution of a transaction and the API in a blockchain system.

Blockchain development mostly follows the Agile approach to development. But when it comes to testing, the Shift left approach is becoming popular to minimize the defect count.

Automation Testing of Cloud Services

Automation testing in the cloud comes with the advantage of low cost, scalability, and easy maintenance. But, what is the advantage of a cloud-based tool? With cloud based tools, you carry out mobile and web testing in different environments and machines, without setting up your infrastructure. Just like 2020, 2021 will see a huge demand in cloud computing. If you have worked on Amazon web services, you might be aware of Astadia, a framework that is highly beneficial for covering load testing along with spike and stress testing.

Another popular cloud-based tool is the Xamarin test cloud. The tool allows testers to write test scripts in C#. By using this tool, you can run acceptance testing of your mobile app over multiple devices, get high-resolution snapshots along with relevant data like RAM and CPU usage. Hence, one of the latest trends in automation testing will involve testing such frameworks for your cloud-based product in 2021.

Automation in Mobile App Testing

Companies have already started following the mobile-first approach in web development in the last few years. In recent years, many companies have started developing app versions of their web applications. With the count of mobile apps increasing regularly, companies will focus more on testing mobile apps. According to a report, the market of mobile app testing will generate a revenue of $8.23 billion by 2025.

With the growing number of mobile devices of different resolutions and OS behavior, we can undoubtedly say that companies will look for testers with experience in automated mobile app testing. Seeing the latest trends in automation testing, frameworks like Appium, Selendroid, Robotium are going to be more prevalent in 2021. Along with that, the demand for testers having experience in these tools will increase as well.

Check how LambdaTest can help you with mobile automation testing with its Appium Mobile Web Automation Grid.

NoOps for Automation

The hype of automation has taken over the complete IT industry. At this time, people tag anything that can utilize or yield an automation platform to be a futuristic model. NoOps perfectly fits the description. The goal of NoOps is to automate the entire work of the Ops team. Although the concept is great, it is still evolving.

If you have a startup or are managing a project where complete automation is yet to implement, NoOps has restricted usage. A fully functional and experienced IT Ops team can provide a professional insight that can beat automated analytics anytime. So, we can say that although NoOps offers great promises, to some extent in 2021, human intervention is still needed.

Bottom Line

Although automation aims to eliminate manual effort, it’s needless to say that a machine can’t operate by itself. We need a human to operate a machine. Although automation testing evolved a lot in the past years, manual testers’ importance is still there. A skilled manual tester can write test cases so that fewer automation scripts can provide huge coverage.

Even now, when AI and ML are aiming towards codeless automation, we still need manual intervention to configure the AI processes. And there are still some domains like user acceptance testing or UX testing where automation will fail to beat the keen observation and instinct of a manual tester. A company will succeed in delivering a product with optimum quality only with – a proper strategy to utilize manual and automation wherever required.

What would be your say for automation testing trends in 2021? Let me know in the comment section below. Happy testing! 🙂