Software Testing Services – What can you see this year?

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In the current digital age, organizations are increasingly riding the digital transformation journey to align themselves with ever-changing market demands. Digital transformation helps businesses increase the number of customer touch points, offer enriched customer experience and achieve faster time to market. Customers today are well-informed and demanding highly responsive mobile and web apps that provide them seamless access to information from anywhere at any time. Any shortcomings in the user experience of products or services are met with zero tolerance by customers causing huge business loss. Hence, demand for software testing services will continue to be huge in this year with Digital Assurance, Agile and DevOps practices, and Quality Engineering playing a critical role.

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Here is a snapshot of software testing trends that are shaping up the market:

1. Testing of the SMAC pack for Digital Assurance: As digital transformation is gaining pace across industries, it is important for organizations to devise an integrated testing approach covering the SMAC (Social, Mobile, Analytics, and Cloud) pack. Digital Assurance is in demand to address the multi-dimensional needs of digital transformation covering the Functionality, Performance, Load, Usability and Security parameters across the digital value chain.
   • With the ever-increasing connectivity of the customers across social channels, Social Media testing has become inevitable and it is taking the top most priority of the CMO’s agenda.
   • The proliferating mobile devices, including smartphones, tablets and other connected devices, have become significant business enablers as customers are increasingly choosing to buy products / services via applications. As the app store approval process is becoming stringent irrespective of mobile platforms, mobile testing will continue to be in demand.
   • The rapid adoption of social media, mobile and web applications by customers is resulting in the generation of enormous structured and unstructured data that has to be tested and analyzed. The testing of data and its analysis help organizations understand the customer demands and choices.
   • Organizations are embracing cloud computing as it provides virtualized hardware and software resources hosted remotely offering the benefits such as reduced costs, and improved efficiencies. Software testing services are now increasingly offered as testing as a service model, wherein testing is conducted in on-premise / on-demand cloud environments.
2. Growing Importance of Security Testing: On top of mobile devices, wearable and connected devices also have been driving business recently. Gartner estimates that 6.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide in 2016 and will reach to 20.8 billion by 2020.  The increasing usage of IoT gadgets and wearable devices, embedded with net connectivity, is growing the trend of “Connected Customer”. In such an increasingly interconnected world, enormous data is accessed and shared via multiple channels. A simple data breach can heavily damage the reputation of an organization, particularly in their digital transformations. Considering the instances of data breaches happened in the last few years and their impact on businesses, organizations are compelled to adopt security testing.  However, security testing should be implemented early in the software development life cycle than as an eleventh-hour exercise.

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3. The Challenges of TEM & TDM: For a large number of organizations, Test Environment Management (TEM) and Test Data Management (TDM) are significant pain areas. It is difficult to manage complex data sets in different test environments. Also, the growing adoption of Agile & DevOps practices is making the test data creation and maintenance difficult. There is an increasing demand for TDM services to handle high data volumes and diverse data sets, and ensure quality and reliability of software applications. However, in the recent past, cloud-based test environments are being quickly set up and transformed as required to handle the challenges of TEM & TDM. Service Virtualization helps in managing the TEM challenges by effective creation and management of test data.  It reduces testing costs, offers easier deployment and management of test cases, and facilitates improved disaster recovery.
4. Need for Customized & Co-managed TCoEs: With the growing adoption of Agile and DevOps practices, organizations are looking for customized TCoEs, or transform their TCoEs, traditionally built as a centralized function, that are aligned with their business goals. Also, most of the organizations are inclined towards a co-managed and collaborative TCoE model, rather than just internally managed or as an outsourced service.
5. Increased Test Automation: Devising increased level of test automation has become unavoidable with continuous testing being an integral part of DevOps practices. The level of test automation, reducing manual testing efforts, indicates competencies of a testing company. There is an increased adoption of test automation, replacing more and more routine manual testing, with a number of test automation tools (open source and licensed) available in the market.
6. Growing Adoption of Agile and DevOps Practices:  To achieve faster time to market, delivery cycles are needed to be shorter, and testing has to be integrated into the development cycle. It requires developers to get more involved with testing. Implementation of Agile and DevOps practices in software development and testing are becoming inevitable to accelerate time to market and gain competitive advantage. Testing in Agile environment has gained significance over the last decade and is now further taken into DevOps wherein Continuous testing plays a key role.
   
7. Demand for Comprehensive Quality Engineering Services: Customers are now demanding more comprehensive Quality Engineering (QE) services coupled with test automation tools and frameworks rather than traditional QA services. QE framework includes metrics-driven approach, continuous improvement and delivery excellence in order to facilitate organizations to offer high-quality software.

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All in all, the digital era is here to stay. And, digital transformation is the order of the day. For smooth and successful digital transformations, software testing is very critical while adopting Agile and DevOps environments. We, at Cigniti, are all set to tap the market potential of software testing services which is estimated to grow at a CAGR of close to 11% in the next four years. Contact us at contact@cigniti.com for your software testing challenges.