{"id":852,"date":"2014-05-04T19:40:38","date_gmt":"2014-05-05T02:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/?p=852"},"modified":"2014-05-04T19:51:45","modified_gmt":"2014-05-05T02:51:45","slug":"testing-trendsor-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/testing-trendsor-not\/","title":{"rendered":"Testing Trends…or not?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read this article<\/a> over the weekend about five emerging trends in software testing \u2013 Test Automation; Rise of mobile and cloud; Emphasis on security; Context-driven testing; and More business involvement.<\/p>\n

I fully acknowledge that I work in a software development environment that isn\u2019t like many others, but while reading the article, I really didn\u2019t feel like any<\/em> of those areas are \u201cemerging\u201d \u2013 all are fully emerged already. Sure, the trends are interesting<\/em> to testers, but emerging? I could waste some space rebutting or commenting on the areas above, but instead, let me offer some alternate trends that I see inside of MS and from some of my colleagues who work elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Fuzzier Role Definitions.  <\/strong>I don\u2019t really like the terms \u201cwhole team approach\u201d or \u201ccombined engineering\u201d, but I do see software teams really figuring out how to work better together and leverage every team members strengths effectively. Great testers are working as Test Specialists<\/em> and working much more broadly across the team. I expect the \u201clines\u201d between software disciplines to fade even more in the future.<\/p>\n

Developers Own More Testing. <\/strong>You can call them \u201cchecks\u201d if you wish (I call them \u201cshort tests\u201d, but software developers are beginning to own much bigger portions of traditional software testing. This is a good thing \u2013 it ensures that daily code quality is high, and gives test specialists a high quality product to work with.<\/p>\n

Testing Live Sites. <\/strong>Mock-test environments typically do a poor job representing production environments. Other than brief sanity checks for the most critical components, many web service teams just roll their new bits straight to production, and then run their tests against the live system. With a good monitoring system (including the ability to stage rollouts and automatically roll back if needed), this is a safe, efficient, and frankly, practical<\/em> method for testing services. <\/p>\n

Data is HUGE.<\/strong> Many software teams have figured out that the best way to get an accurate representation of how customers use software is collect and analyze data from those same customers. A whole lot of traditional test activities can be replaced by product instrumentation, and an efficient method for getting product instrumentation back to the team for analysis. On a lot of teams, last year\u2019s testers are this  year\u2019s data analysts and data scientists. While not every tester is cut out for this role, this move to data analysis is a strong trend on a lot of software teams.<\/p>\n

To critique myself for a moment, I think a lot of readers could say that none of these points are emerging either. That\u2019s a fair point, since I know teams that have been doing everything above for years\u2026but I\u2019m just now seeing some of these trends \u201cemerge\u201d on multiple teams (and not just those testing web services or sites).<\/p>\n

What trends do you see? Did I miss anything huge? Have the above four points already<\/em> reached the tipping point of emergence?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read this article over the weekend about five emerging trends in software testing \u2013 Test Automation; Rise of mobile and cloud; Emphasis on security; Context-driven testing; and More business involvement. I fully acknowledge that I work in a software development environment that isn\u2019t like many others, but while reading the article, I really didn\u2019t…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-852","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-allposts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=852"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/852\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=852"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=852"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/angryweasel.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=852"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}