What Can We Learn From The State Of Testing In 2021?
Co-Founder and Chief Solution Architect at PractiTest-Test Management. OnlineTestConf founder and chairman. Getty  I started testing software back in college. That was over 20 years ago, when the world was worried about the potential apocalypse that would hit humanity at midnight on December 31, 1999. Maybe it was the billions of dollars invested in finding and fixing the Y2K bug (as it was known back then), or maybe it was a case of unnecessary global mass hysteria. But other than some minor glitches and your usual midnight kisses, nothing really happened on that scary evening. Fast-forwarding my professional career, Ive worked in all sorts of organizations, ranging from small internet startups to large multinational corporations. Ive interacted with companies and testers from all four corners of the world, learning about testing practices and processes from many of the leading figures in the quality assurance ecosystem. As part of my efforts to be more active within the testing community, I started a blog in the late 2000s. Then, about eight years ago, while working on a series of articles I ran into an issue  I could not find any source of information about the practices and methodologies of testers worldwide. This is when I approached a colleague, and we started a project called The State of Testing Report. For eight years, weve been running a survey among the global testing community. The results are presented in a free report showing the current status of QA worldwide and the gradual changes taking place over the years. This allows us to point toward the challenges and opportunities both in the testing community and also in the software development industry. Our latest version of the report was just released, and this is a great opportunity to share some of its insights. Testing can't be done by anyone in the organization  it's a technical profession. According to the 2021 survey results, QA teams are basing their work more and more on technical tasks such as test automation, which is implemented at an impressive rate of close to 90% within surveyed organizations. Not surprisingly, when we asked which skills would be important to the testing world in three to five years, automation was frequently mentioned. An overwhelming 97% of respondents said that functional test automation was either important or very important for testers to succeed in their current line of work. Similarly, an impressive rate of approximately 85% of surveyed organizations' development teams is adopting CI/CD practices in their projects, reinforcing the adoption of test automation across all functions  not just QA and testing teams. This is in line with data from other reports where one out of two companies is deploying new builds daily. It is worth taking into consideration, however, that QA professionals tend to be optimistic in regards to their perception of automation adoption, according to a different survey. At the same time, testing professionals work further across the software development life cycle (SDLC). We've seen more teams "shifting left" (59%), but also many teams "shifting right" (40%), implementing activities such as testing in production and chaos engineering. This is a great example of how the lines between the teams and their responsibilities are being blurred. Testing the products quality is not just in the hands of professionals who are holding the QA or tester titles anymore. Quality and business value are becoming closer in meaning. Another interesting finding of the report is the momentum gained by the adoption of behavior-driven development (BDD), where we now see 27% of organizations report that they work based on this approach, which is an increase of close to 60% since 2018. To put this in more concrete terms, BDD, test-driven development (TDD) and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) represented about 30% of performed testers tasks in 2020. BDD usage in scripting and test automation is also growing. It is important to challenge our beliefs and be proven wrong once in a while. A thing I like about the data we found is that it doesnt necessarily confirm our initial hypothesis, and it challenges us to think deeper and wider about what is going on around us. One such surprising finding is the fact that traditional dedicated testing teams are growing in scale. This goes against many of the current thoughts that Agile practices are disassembling monolithic testing teams and embedding testers within organic Agile teams, pushing toward a decentralized all-team-testing approach. Still, we see that the number of organizations with 16 or more dedicated testers increased by 10% over 2020, to 34%. This growth can be indicative of the increased reliance enterprises are placing on their testing teams  to fulfill the growing importance they see in assuring the quality of their end products. This is also a positive reinforcement to my belief that no matter how common automation will become, the role of the software QA tester is here to stay. It will need to undergo more changes, and its responsibilities will become different as I described in my Forbes Council Post article earlier this year about the changing role of the software quality architect, but testing will continue to be done by testers in the near future and possibly in the not-so-near future, too. It's time to acquire working knowledge. With automation growing in importance, I believe that any QA professional should make sure to acquire working knowledge in the area. Another finding from our report is that one of the top sources of QA learning today is online courses, webinars and conferences, so this makes it more accessible, with an endless amount of both free and paid sessions to attend. For testers aiming to learn from these findings, it's important to be proactive within your organizations and ask development teams to share their work while it's being done, so you can learn from them while performing your daily job. This may require some extra time and discussion with your managers, but it will allow you to get better at your job faster and will be beneficial to you and your organization alike. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.