Software Testing Trends in 2021

The past 2020 year has clearly shown us the importance of software in our everyday life.

Remote work, distance learning, worries about our health — all this needs qualitative and proved software.

This means that QA services become more and more popular.

This article is dedicated to analyzing six most popular software testing trends in 2021, which can be helpful either for experienced QA engineers or QA testing companies in general.

Testing Trends

Software testing with IoT

The method of merging several objects into a general system is called the “Internet of Things”.

This approach was significantly developed during the last few years, therefore, there is a serious premise to create entire ecosystems of “smart” objects that can operate products and services for end-users (or us).

It’s not easy to test such software since we need to perform testing in terms of scalability, security, performance, and functionality.

Using machine learning and artificial intelligence

The products based on machine learning and artificial intelligence are very promising and  rapidly become popular among numerous world-class companies.

Some experts expect that many companies and “top players” on the market of products and services will make such technologies crucial for a software development field and therefore, this will affect the work of QA engineers.

AI and ML will help to build well-balanced processes where human work is not needed and test coverage becomes wider.

Test automation

This tendency became a sustainable method of development of the whole software testing field many years ago. Only automation allows users to considerably decrease the number of manual tests and significantly accelerate the execution of some complex tests.

It’s expected that 2021 will become the time to search for a compromise between manual and automated testing. This happens because automated tests can cover much wider test coverage, in comparison with manual testing but they can’t find unexpected bugs.

Mobile app testing

Coronavirus and its consequences such as quarantine and self-isolation made people use mobile devices more and more. This increasing necessity automatically results in the bigger need for a GameDev QA engineer.

It’s an interesting challenge for the entire software testing field since the needs for mobile software and its quality will inevitably grow, therefore, to be competitive, you need to develop the services of world-class mobile software testing.

User expectations constantly grow, so we need to take care not only of software performance and functionality but pay special attention to localization, responsiveness, and UX.

Work on software security

A massive migration of users online led to the following question arising: how should we develop completely safe software? Since numerous tasks in the net are connected with financial manipulations, we need good protection from potential cyber-attacks.

Security testing becomes important in a well-balanced business strategy of development and further support of any modern software. This, in turn, means that global concerns and companies will need first-class QA specialists in this field.

Switching to Agile

Agile differs from other methodologies in terms of its organization of a working process — in a form of short cycles. This software testing method doesn’t only shift to the last stage of its development lifecycle but is also modified in a proper component of every sprint.

If a QA engineer uses this flexible methodology, he/she needs to constantly develop his/her communication skills since sometimes it’s necessary to speak to clients and a development department and it’s mostly in English.

A QA specialist needs to develop such skills, to be in demand in 2021.

Conclusion

In 2021, it’s important to pay special attention to the development of software testing skills, mobile app functionality, and also correct implementation of new technologies in our everyday life.