To understand the future of test automation and the emerging trends and technologies it comprises, it's crucial to first understand where the testing landscape is and where it’s been. Over the last ten years, the enterprise IT environment has changed dramatically. Not long ago, even the largest organizations relied on just a handful of core financial, ERP and HR systems across their business – with applications generally deployed on-premise and managed internally.

Current State of Test Automation

Fast forward a decade and the landscape is completely different, with organizations across all sectors acknowledging the requirement for deep transformation in the face of accelerating disruption challenges. Major software application platforms such as SAP and Oracle have expanded and woven across organizations rapidly, while new enterprise suites from vendors such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow and others have become established.

Organizations have also been more willing to adopt best-of-breed cloud solutions to address business-specific functions and fill gaps, while a series of national and international regulatory requirements – such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) – continue to make compliance increasingly challenging. 

Emerging Trends in Test Automation

All of these factors converge to drive increased change in the IT landscape, and that’s before CIOs and their teams have incorporated the changes they need to make in response to the latest industry trends and hot topics. The top five test automation trends and technologies that are shaping the testing landscape today include:

1. Cloud-Based Testing

As IT landscapes become increasingly diverse, more organizations are developing, operating and testing in the cloud. Like other solutions that are moving to the cloud, cloud testing can offer distinct advantages of efficiency, scalability, and affordability. Cloud-based testing empowers customers to leverage the same proven continuous test automation platform that leading global enterprises depend on to reduce risk, accelerate testing and improve quality, all in a cloud-based environment.

2. Continuous Testing

With business processes now spanning multiple deployment models, many feature elements that are delivered by external vendors via SaaS models are driving the need for continuous automation. And with SaaS vendors following their own specific testing and release cycles, it can be hard to keep pace. For example, it’s not uncommon for software vendors to impose just a three-day testing window each month before updates are released into a production instance.

At the same time, teams are also being pressured to accelerate their own internal application development programs. Given these time and resource pressures, it’s hardly surprising that more organizations accept that they simply can’t rely on traditional testing methods to meet their evolving applications needs.

The only realistic alternative is to adopt an automated approach that allows you to start testing much earlier in the project lifecycle – helping you to eliminate your QA backlog and roll out new products and innovations more quickly. Effective automation is simply the only way to keep up with agile development because end-to-end testing must be done repeatedly and iteratively to ensure quality.

3. Robotic Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is an emerging technological innovation already implemented in companies belonging to almost every sector and has achieved success in optimizing business processes and reducing costs. RPA has been gaining popularity because it offers several benefits over traditional process automation methods. When applied correctly and in the right situation, it can be faster, more accurate, and easier to scale than more traditional methods of working in the digital space.

4. Codeless Test Automation

While codeless test automation is nothing new to the industry, there will be an increase in low-code and no-code automation in the coming years. This revolutionary approach allows testers and developers to automate test cases without thinking about coding. It not only provides companies with a powerful interface for developing automation suites, but the maintenance is hassle-free and the cost of automation decreases significantly.

5. AI-Driven Testing

Using artificial intelligence in testing can simplify the entire software development lifecycle. AI-powered tools can help minimize the tedious aspect of software development and testing while automating the entire process. Being a fairly new concept in the testing process, AI-based tools in automation testing can add value by providing greater test coverage, preventing errors across a variety of testing activities, accelerating test case creation by imitating test case writing style, and delegating time-consuming and challenging maintenance processes to AI. In addition, analytics powered by AI and machine learning (ML) can bring together multi-source, multi-variant data to recognize patterns and generate a unified enterprise view of your processes.

Robotic Process Automation in Testing

Robotic Process Automation RPA has been one of the hottest topics in the business world for the past few years. RPA is a technology that allows us to automate repetitive, rule-based human tasks using software bots or ‘robots.’ RPA can be considered the next step in digital evolution. This technology is not just limited to process automation but also has the potential to entirely change the way we work.

While there are differences, automated testing, and RPA share commonalities. In addition to being efficiency-boosting solutions, both are created to run quickly and independently of human intervention. This autonomous aspect of automation dictates the need for well-executed setup and maintenance. Tools like process discovery, with the ability to automate the capture of business processes step by step, can support the building of accurate automation for testing and RPA.

Ideally, both testing and RPA tools should have orchestration and scheduling capabilities, along with connected analytics and reporting, and automation asset versioning. The ability to share reusable assets and self-healing capabilities can also make test automation and RPA more practicable, dynamic, and scalable.

The recent Forrester report, “RPA And Test Automation Are More Friends Than Foes,” outlines how automated testing and RPA technologies can work together to accelerate innovation and scale automation. Key findings include:

  • RPA And Test Automation Share Common Strengths - Enterprises are evaluating test automation platforms to support task automation for business applications. Similarly, they eye RPA for testing use cases. Overlaps exist, but so do clear areas of depth and differences.
  • RPA And Testing Tools Have Opportunity To Help Enterprises Scale Automation - Testing discipline, methods, and tools add structure and quality support that RPA bots need. Conversely, QA teams can use RPA platforms to build test scripts that refine complex business processes.
  • RPA Bot Maintenance, Resiliency, And Software Quality Inhibit Scale Maintaining - RPA-based bots are costly, challenging enterprise efforts to scale automation. Test automation tools can help.

RPA presents an opportunity to do more with less by easing the burden of rote, mundane or inefficient tasks through automation. To realize the true value of RPA, automation must be scalable and adapt easily to ongoing change.

Adoption of Cloud-Based Automation

Worksoft, with its cloud-based, integrated platform for automated business process discovery and testing, can help you minimize the risks associated with IT innovation and digital transformation - enabling organizations to:

  • Support critical enterprise applications, including on-premise, cloud, mobile, Web, and HTML
  • Deliver end-to-end automated application testing across entire business processes, going beyond SAP to support platforms such as Oracle, Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow, and others
  • Add value and accelerate testing through automated discovery, analytics, documentation, compliance support, and robotic process automation

The bottom line is that organizations must avoid the introduction of bugs because it will impact their overall operations. A cloud-based automation solution from Worksoft allows them to shorten project timelines and improve IT team productivity by speeding up testing cycles and reducing manual effort, offering effective regression testing to ensure high-quality code. As a result, they get higher quality applications in users' hands.

Using Worksoft's automation solutions in DevOps environments can not only speed the deployment of high quality software, but also dramatically reduce testing time by up to 90 percent - even in the face of continuous development, integration, and overall change.

With more than 20 years of experience delivering automated business process discovery and testing solutions, Worksoft has the expertise to deliver innovative technology in today’s constantly changing applications landscape. And with the company’s specific focus on the enterprise packaged application space, Worksoft not only supports applications across the entire enterprise but also can deliver the automation needed to support end-to-end business processes across applications as well as cloud, mobile, Web, and HTML platforms.

To find out more about how Worksoft’s automated testing can help your business take back control in today’s sprawling applications environment, visit www.worksoft.com or contact info@worksoft.com