As the software development industry has seen unprecedented levels of digital transformation, the demand for automated testing in the CI/CD pipeline has taken on greater urgency, especially at the early stages. Also, new advancements in AI are helping developers with some of the biggest challenges in testing: test creation, maintenance, and many manual tasks. Many companies have noticed and are spending more on their automated testing initiatives.
Strong testing practices have gotten to be so crucial that they’ve become “the main differentiator between companies that are successful and those that aren’t,” according to Guy Arieli, the QA CTO at Digital.ai. When companies are looking for an automated testing solution, they’re primarily looking for one that will increase the quality of their releases, increase the speed at which they can be done, and be the most cost-efficient. A common approach among enterprise customers is to seek out a vendor that satisfies most of their needs while integrating into their CI/CD pipelines.
“We see customers want a unified solution. You don’t want to be using disparate tools for end-to-end testing of different types of clients,” said Dan Belcher, the co-founder of mabl. “Increasingly, they’re pushing us to add value to those end-to-end tests with insight around things like performance and visual correctness and other kinds of attributes of quality because they’re trying to move from pure quality assurance like ‘did I break this core feature?’ to quality engineering: ‘Is the feature better than it was before? Is it faster? Is it more accessible? Is it visually appealing?’ ”
A Guide to automated testing providers
How do vendors help customers with their automated testing initiatives?
Chris Haggan, the product management lead at HCL OneTest, said it’s more than just getting the solution with the most features. It’s also about supporting users with the tools they already have and seeing if it fits appropriately with the development organization’s overall approach. Another issue is whether the organization has enough resources to add testing solutions to the mix since they can add complexity.
Where to start?
To start with their automated initiatives, organizations need to build quality into the application earlier, as quality has become a core functional necessity, and testing early on is vital.
“We see people all the time wanting to fully automate everything in weeks. Yes, of course, that is technically possible. Still, it takes time to evaluate what’s important to test, how solutions fit into your CI/CD chain, which generates test data, and so on, according to Kevin Surace, the CEO and co-founder of Appvance. “While no one wants to hear it, the best automation strategy is laid out over a year,” Surace added. Building quality comes down to both the organization’s culture and in executing deep code analysis, as well as deep reliability and security at the earliest stages. “If you put it at the end, you can’t accelerate your delivery. You’re always kind of running into a bottleneck at the end of the process,” said Mark Lambert, the vice president of Strategic Initiatives at Parasoft.
