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Testing Trends to Look Out for in 2019

The adoption of DevOps and Agile has been one of the biggest trends to be seen in the testing domain. A rising trend in the domain of automation testing is leading to more systems being developed in every minute. With the development of information technology, the testing domain is also changing. Gone are the days when the testing phase of software is satisfied with manual testing. With the IT industry already witnessing DevOps, there are few skills that are needed to be adopted by a tester in 2019 to remain competitive.

1. Testing in Advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

A horde of futuristic developments is brought in the IT industry by AI. The center stage is already dominated by natural language processing, neural systems, and machine learning. The best thing about artificial intelligence is the capacity of a system in developing more systems.

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Why You Should Use Puppeteer for Testing

Over the past decade, the world has seen the emergence of powerful JavaScript-based web apps while new frameworks evolved. These frameworks challenged issues that had long been associated with crippling website performance. Interactive UI elements, seamless speed, and impressive styling components have started co-existing within a website without compromising the speed too heavily. CSS and HTML are now injected into JS instead of the other way around because JS is simply more efficient. While the use of these JavaScript frameworks has boosted performance, it has taken a toll on testers.

Testing and debugging has become more and more complex. Puppeteer has been introduced as a node library used to enable Chrome browser testing.

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5 Significant Benefits for Organizations Acquiring Codeless Test Automation

Testing processes have always been a sore spot for organizations during the product development cycle. In an organization where a single software bug can cause severe financial losses, quality assurance (QA) testing is on top priority for any software product irrespective of its scale of deployment.

In the traditional test approach, manual testing processes have been used with the understanding that these methods would provide accurate results. However, these processes are quite lengthy and tiring. Manual testing has proved its mettle in many cases undoubtedly; however, it often fails to deliver under the overflow of features, links, buttons, java scripts, and integrations.

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8 Test Automation Anti-Patterns (And How to Avoid Them)

No matter how well-versed you are with testing or how advanced your automation technology is, it’s essential to start automation with a strong test design. Without one, teams can encounter a range of problems that compound to create ineffective, incomplete, and hard-to-maintain tests. To ensure quality, cost efficiency, and on-time delivery, it’s important to recognize the signs that your tests aren’t performing optimally. Below are eight “anti-patterns,” or habits that I believe should be avoided if possible, for the best testing experience and end-product.

#1: Sequence Length Is Too Long

Tests are often designed as long sequences of small steps, making it difficult to manage and maintain them. For example, when an application you are testing changes, it is hard to factor these changes into other relevant tests.

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Why Software Testing is Key to DevOps

One of the major reasons organizations adopt DevOps practices is to accelerate delivery of software to production. This includes deploying more frequently and reducing lead time.

However, many organizations fail to include quality components in their practices. This leads to organizations delivering code faster, but unfortunately, that code is just poor. Continuous deployment without quality is just delivering continuous bugs to your customers.

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Unit Tests Vs. Integration Tests: Battle Continues

One would expect that after being in the industry for almost 20 years, a trivial comparison like this would be years behind me, but I am probably less than correct. It seems that the right amount of unit tests is still a burning issue that needs some attention. At Knoldus, we have the policy of maintaining a very high code coverage so that we can objectively validate the quality of the code through our now publicly available tool CodeSquad.

We place a very high premium on writing very very effective unit tests. However, a recent discussion with one of our esteemed clients made us rethink this strategy. Let us be clear though that we do not believe that we should not be writing unit tests but the distribution between the unit and integration tests, the scenarios in which we can skip unit tests do need a review. The following is an attempt to do that:

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Career Trends of Software Test Automation Engineering in 2019

Why You Should Be an Automation Tester

The career of test automation is growing day by day, not only because it reduces human effort but also because of its demands. When considering which direction to pursue in an automation testing career, here are a few advantages of test automation you should think about:

  • It’s creative and challenging: Testing is like solving puzzles and problems, and automation testing will bring something new to you every day. By acting as the end-user, you’re the one who has to get creative when thinking of places there may be inconsistencies.
  • You’re constantly learning: Once you start automating, there’s always more to learn. Your work will never be stagnant as you’ll be continuously growing and improving your practice.
  • It’s a specialized skill: Following the misconception that everyone can test, most testers start in a similar field and find themselves being drawn to the role, but it requires in-depth knowledge of development patterns as well as good technical programming skills. Those who find it’s their calling are sure to fall in love with test automation.
  • It’s rewarding: You’re essentially helping your company build products in less time with lower costs and greater quality. You’ll probably see your impact every day on the job.
  • There’s a strong community: One of the best things about being an automation tester is the supportive and robust community, from StackOverflow to Twitter, where you can discuss the best practices and trending topics in the industry.

Why 2019 Is a Great Time to Be an Automation Tester

For the past several years, QA and test analyst job ads have stressed the need for test automation skills. Today, more and more components of the lifecycle are being automated and there is a focus on automating the entire lifecycle. It’s rare to see a job listing for a test role where there isn’t at least a demand for an understanding of test automation and at least one scripting language. At the time I’m writing this article, there are roughly 16,955 available jobs in "test automation engineering" on Indeed, 30,705 jobs on Glassdoor, and 5,580 jobs posted on LinkedIn. These numbers indicate the high demand for this skill, and consequently, high job security. Keep in mind the fact that as an automation tester, you’ll always be needed and will find no lack of leading companies trying their hardest to recruit you, and there are constantly opportunities to grow in your career to reach a managerial level.

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The Mystery Behind Testing ”The Integration of Payment Gateways”

Payment gateways are one of today's most important integrations that are done in the ever trending online market space. Any online market space that requires a transaction needs a payment gateway, be it Amazon, Flipkart, Uber, Airbnb, MakeMyTrip, Big Basket, etc.

Integration testing remains a mystery for an application with a payment gateway. I say so because most of us usually do not unveil the actual testing efforts required to test the gateway integration. We have a tendency to ensure payments happen with a valid card, and it does not happen with an invalid card. But trust me, it's much more than that.

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Good Tests and Bad Metrics: Choosing Quality Over Quantity in Software Testing

As a part of the quality assurance team, you are always expected to carry a quality stick to ensure quality is maintained to a "T." We are always asked to put ourselves into the shoes of the customers and ensure the products/projects meet their expectations with the highest quality achieved.

But the actual irony lies where all our quality metrics boil down to quantitative numbers and terms like bugs logged, the number of test cases written, the number of test cases executed, time spent on testing, URLs tested, browsers checked for cross-browser testing, defect leakage, and more.

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Top 26 Software Testing Quotes

Here are some of the most interesting, inspiring, and contentious software testing quotes that have crossed our path over the past year.

The testing mindset is ‘I’m going to figure out how to break this.’ This is great because it gets developers thinking: ‘I’m not going to let them break this’ — and the software is much stronger as a result.

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Which Is Better: Traditional Or Codeless ML Based Test Automation?

Before we go exploring deep into the topic, we will first take a look at the basics of testing, machine learning (ML) based testing automation, and traditional testing automation.

Why Is Testing An Essential Part Of The Software Industry?

The world today is calling out for automation and advancements in every possible field. On comparing with the technology a few centuries before and today, there is a significant change in the area of technological advancements. Every day, software is being developed which assists humans in numerous ways. Have you given a thought to how these work?

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Why Understanding Regression Defects Is Important for Your Next Release

‘Regression’ a word that is thought of with a lot of pain by software testers around the globe. We are aware of how mentally taxing yet indispensable regression testing can be for a release window. Sometimes, we even wonder whether regression testing is really needed? Why do we need to perform it when a bug-free software can never be ready? Well, the answer is yes! We need to perform regression testing on regular basis. The reason we do so is to discover regression defects. Wondering what regression defects are and how you can deal with them effectively? Well, in this article, I will be addressing key points for you to be aware of what regression defects are and how you can discover and handle regression defects for a successful release.

So, What Are Regression Defects Bugs?

Often during software testing, some bugs are detected and a quick bug fix is carried out. Regression testing is executed in order to ensure that the bug fix didn’t cause any abruption in the application’s intended functionality. When some bugs are found to be occurring as a result of the bug fix, those are known as regression bugs. For example, let’s say your login page is having some errors and the developer fixed it. Now, the login page is working fine, but the registration page is causing some validation or other errors that did not exist earlier. The new error may have been caused because of the fix on the login page. This is a regression defect and it is relevant to deal with for delivering a more robust product in the market.

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Common Myths About Software Testing

If there is something that has registered constant growth and evolution over the years, it has to be the software testing industry.

According to a study conducted by Technavio, the Global Software Testing System Integration Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of +15 percent from 2018-2022. Thus, the field is on an all-time high.