10 Software testing trends in 2024

QAOps as a specific form of DevOps

The goal of DevOps is to shorten the systems development life cycle (SDLC), while teams can focus on building features, fixing bugs, and pushes frequent updates that are in alignment with business objectives. DevOps abridges the collaboration between developers and business operationalists. At the same time, QAOps helps to increase the direct communication flow between testing engineers and developers by integrating software testing into the CI/CD pipeline. Main activities defined in two key principles:

Because more teams are gearing toward DevOps, QAOps is expected to be a growing trend in 2024.

Hybrid testing models - including both manual and automation testing In this technological period, automation testing is a hot topic, however, manual testing also should not be eliminated. In fact, robust QA teams must appropriately combine manual and automated testing to achieve the most in ensuring software quality. The role of automated testing is undeniable — but some testing types such as exploratory or usability testing still need to be manually carried out. For this matter, a hybrid form of testing is being used which inculcates both manual and automating testing methodologies. It takes advantage of both forms of testing approaches. Hybrid form of testing helps to overcome challenges of testing complex test data in a variety of test-cases in a shorter period of time, without overlooking details. Integrating both automated and manual testing tools and practices is going to be a continuing trend in the next couple of years and particularly in year 2024.

Automating mobile testing Mobile testing can be defined as a procedure in which the applications developed for the mobiles are being tested for their user friendliness, operational performance, and reliability. Currently, the usage of automating tools for mobile testing is quite lower. However, with an increasing shift from desktop applications to mobile applications shall increase the usage of automating testing tools for mobile applications. Some of the automating tools for mobile testing include but not limited to Robotium, Monkey Runner Ranorex, Appium, Appium Studio and UI Automator. In addition, the fifth generation of wireless communications technologies, 5G, which seem to get even more complicated by the day, will demand an increasing role of testing and applying only advanced practice, both from Dev and QA teams.

Configuring Management Automation Like other areas, automation performs a critical part in server configuration management as well. Server's configuring management is a method to make the server reach at a required state, previously defined by provisioning scripts such as automating tool's particular languages and characteristics. Automation in upcoming years, is going to become the heart of configuration management for servers.

Shift Left Testing and shortened cycles
Shift left testing is more of an approach to system or software testing where testing is being performed throughout the SDLC. Improvements in technologies, processes, devices' functionality and better infrastructure helps the teams to integrate, test and release the product more quickly in the market. In 2024, it is expected that software development companies shall invest more time in improving their development processes and delivery infrastructure by utilizing effective integration tools. The ever-growing demand of DevOps tools and processes shall lead to increased shift to automating testing tools in quality assurance.

Increased adoption of Artificial intelligence for analytics
With artificial intelligence, the future the going to be exciting and fascinating, the new world shall be completely different. The computer power gets doubled every 18 months and this tremendous rise to computer power shall take us to the foundation of the singularity which is AI or artificial Intelligence. Software development teams are now using AI for improving the efficiency of developing teams and overall product quality. This trend shall continue to a greater extent in 2024 and next years.

Automating API testing
An application performance interface (or more commonly known as API) allows two or more different devices to connect with each other. When we book a flight, make a hotel reservation, call a taxi through mobile applications, API like the unsung hero works in the background. In testing, the focus is now shifting to user interface testing or UI testing. These are currently being performed manually, however, the trend has been shifting towards automating the API testing and UI testing.

Integration of teams
With DevOps and such other tools gaining momentum, all the software development teams including developers, operations, and testing teams can come together for the purpose of enhancing collaboration and efficiency by automating system workflows and infrastructure with continuous monitoring of product's performance. Integration can also enable teams to automate almost everything, from infrastructure provisioning to testing of new code.

IoT Testing The internet of things, or IoT, is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction. The number of IoT devices all around the world will reach 20.5 billion by the end of 2020, by Gartner. The growing demand for IoT testing requires companies to ensure they have specialists with appropriate technical skills and tools to perform it. For test engineers, this trend will have a major impact and they will have to deal with a huge amount of work, especially with monitoring communication protocols and multiple combinations of different elements of an IoT system. Therefore, It will be necessary for each test engineer to expand knowledge and enhance skills in all types of software testing.

Security testing: cybersecurity demands and Risk Compliance Security testing should make not only transactions secure (money or data), but also protects their end-users. Because cyber threats can take place in any form, at any moment, security testing will continue to be a hot topic in the following year. Although risk compliance and security have always been important, they don't usually get a dedicated separate section in the reports. In 2024 though, security testing becomes one of the main emerging trends in software testing. Basically, the security testing trend points out that organizations across all industries should focus on ensuring the security of their software more than ever, cybersecurity will be a big thing in 2024, so companies have to invest heavily in testing the security of their products.