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6 Top Automation Testing Trends to Watch Out in 2021

6 Top Automation Testing Trends to Watch Out in 2021

Test automation has raised the standards of software QA and opened a whole new world of possibilities to testing professionals — wider test coverage, improved accuracy, lesser time-to-market, increased efficiency, and so on.

With testing tools and frameworks utilizing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques, automation testing has become a pivotal component of product development and deployment; just like Agile and DevOps.

In this article, we have collated six best trends that are poised to occur in the automation testing landscape in 2021.

So, let’s take a look.

  1. Hyper-Automation Testing

Hyper-automation, a strategy that combines the powers of Robotic Process Automation (RPA),  Natural Language Processing (NLP), AI and ML, has become significant in the past few years. Gartner estimates that by 2024, the operational costs of organizations will be lower by 30%, with the help of hyper-automation.

This year, organizations will incorporate hyper-automation techniques to automated testing processes in order to improve developer/tester productivity, enhance operational efficiency, and to better analyze automation reports.

  1. Emergence of DevTestOps

Automating DevOps practices accelerates the app development and deployment lifecycle and helps Agile teams to make frequent and quicker releases. To ensure high quality for the software at each stage of the development process, Continuous testing practices are now being merged with DevOps workflows.

This has given rise to the concept of DevTestOps. It aims to highlight the role of  testers in the DevOps cycle by emphasizing on the importance of integrating a continuous testing framework in the CI/CD pipeline. With the testing team providing continuous feedback, developers will be able to easily detect defects before it’s too late.

  1. Increased Adoption of Codeless Automation Testing Tools

Built on AI technology and driven by visual modeling, codeless test automation empowers teams to generate test scenarios without writing a single line of code. It benefits those testers, who have little or zero programming/coding knowledge, to create, review and implement automated tests and thus, reduce the time spent on repetitive test cases.

Codeless automation testing tools are expected to dominate the likes of the testing community this year, with Selenium IDE being the frontrunner. TestCraft, test.ai, Ranorex, Perfecto and TestSigma are other similar tools that will be adopted by testers and QA experts for performing codeless automation testing.

  1. Self-Healing Test Automation

Another automation testing trend that is set to  become popular in 2021 is the self-healing test automation solution. AI and ML algorithms enable testing tools to ‘self-adapt’ to the changes introduced in the application UI; without breaking an ongoing  automated test. 

Most automation testing scripts are based on a specific element, denoted by XPath/element ID. An absence or a change in the XPath will completely break all the test cases. Such a scenario will not occur in AI-driven testing tools, because they have the capability to self-heal or self-correct (by identifying an alternate element) during runtime; based on learning and test results. 

  1. Implementation of Smart Test Execution

 It’s really frustrating to waste hours testing and running an entire test suite for every single change in the build. What if you can identify a specific number of tests to run for a particular check-in? That’s what smart test execution does. 

By leveraging AI and ML, smart test execution tools target only those tests associated with the code change(s), to be run for validation. This ultimately saves time and effort, and with faster release cycles, testers can complete testing much quickly and efficiently. This intelligent test execution approach will make a mark in 2021.

  1. Parallel Testing Using AutoScaling CI/CD Runners 

Another smarter way of executing automated tests and speeding up test cycles is by doing parallel testing using frameworks such as Selenium Grid. As the name suggests, tests are run concurrently, instead of one test after another. 

Parallel testing entails either or both of the following two scenarios — 

  • a single test script is made to run concurrently on multiple testing environments 
  • Multiple test scripts are run simultaneously in a single testing environment.

DevOps professionals will look forward to autoscaling CI/CD runners, such as GitLab Runner, for conducting parallel testing. These autoscaling runners have the capacity to control the variations that crop up in the different servers; thus, properly managing the queues for parallel testing.

Conclusion

These trends will set a revolution in the field of automation testing by saving valuable time and resources, and enhancing the collaboration between developers and testers/QA professionals, right from the development phase to the final deployment of the product.

And, to ensure that your product meets the highest quality benchmarks, leverage the services of certified automation testing professionals who closely monitor these trends and adopt them into their workflows.

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