What is the future of Software Testing?

Outsourcing was the main way a lot of testing gets done in 2008, but it wasn't always in that way. In the beginning, very little testing was outsourced. Testing was performed by people employed within the same organization that wrote the software. Developers and testers worked side by side to get the software written and tested.

For the last decades Software Testing industry experienced big changes as testing moves earlier in the process and becomes more important for whole cycle of development. Today, testing plays significant role in development process to ensure reliable quality and security of the product. Software testers and analysts are now key part of any product team. Outsourcing giants are deriving up to 10 per cent of revenue from software testing services and significantly growing each year.

However, there is a gap that exists in testing that deteriorates quality, productivity, and the general manageability of the entire development lifecycle. It is the gap between bug creation and bug detection. The larger the gap, the more time a bug stays in the system, and the longer bugs stay in the system the more expensive is to remove them. In the future testers should eliminate that gap by change the way they do testing.

In 2008 developers introduce a bug right before an accident just with a few concerted attempts made to find the bug until the binary is built. Inserting the bugs programmers allow them to feel free until far too late in the process where testers depend on late cycle bug finding. But Testing is too important to wait until the end of the development cycle to start it.

Recent announcements of the leading organizations ranging from Symantec to Microsoft about Top 25 programming errors that lead to security bugs emphasize an avoidance of those mistakes by programmers and computer science programs. All that proved once again that "Quality has to be everyone’s job".

So, what is the future of software testing? Will it be a testsourcing era, where test techniques move deeper and earlier in the development and testers will do work more similar to software design than software verification. Will Software Tester deal with structural bugs or business logic bugs? Dealing with business logic bugs means that Testers have to understand business logic itself, which means more interaction with customers and industries where software operates. In this case Testing not only moves earlier in software development cycle but involve itself with requirements and prototypes that it haven't done before.

As for the numbers there are some estimations of Indian companies indicated that global software testing business will reach $13Bl by 2010. But as Satyam scandal rocks outsourcing industry we may have different forecasts. As for the main trends in the industry there are suggestions that software testing in the future will look very different than it does today. The recent development of new emerging technologies such as SOA, web services and SaaS, alongside with agile approach in software development and increased emphasis on 4Rs will significantly change main trends in application testing.

In increasingly automated and "robot" driven engineering environment , the Testing professional will continue to be pivotal in the Software Engineering Lifecycle. Working in multi-disciplinary teams alongside with Subject Matter Experts, Business Analysts, Architects and End Users, they will continue to play the roles of: arbitrator, mediator, translator and negotiator between other parties, ensuring that their ideas are not only effectively specified and designed, but that the criteria required for effective quality and testing is captured and articulated into the models and tools, so that test are accurately generated by the "robots" to verify the design and validate the requirements.

In the future Testers will concentrate on adding value to the business and software development lifecycle and will operate in a new more important position where the combination of their structured process driven approach, creativity and ability to articulate quality and testing criteria into the models will be crucial in the success of Business implementation of technology.



Viva Testers ;)