Future of Testing

Writing by ian on Monday, 16 of February, 2009 at 11:26 am

Trends like Web based  applications, Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Software as a Service (SaaS), Wireless Technologies, Mobile technologies, with the increasing emphasis on repeatability, reliability, re-use and robustness, has opened a new path to testing, emphasizing more on Analysis and Design phases and ensuring early engagement of testing in these areas.

Analysis and design have been people based activities with Business Analysts and Systems Architects producing a combination of natural language, some structured language techniques, models and diagramming techniques, hence leading to business requirements and functional designs which do not meet the four key criteria which make the resultant systems ‘testable’. And to make the quality of the application clear, assumption free, unambiguous and complete, with the limited time, we will need a more structured and more automated analysis and design technique, which can be attained with robotizing the Static Testing.

In this new world, the Professional Tester will need to further concentrate on adding value to the business and the software development lifecycle and will hence need to operate in a new and elevated position where the combination of their structured process driven approach, creativity, destructive inquisitiveness and ability to articulate and define quality and testing criteria into the models will be critical to the success of the business implementation of technology. 

The role of the Professional Tester will now become more interesting and more essential. And so will Testing and Quality Assurance, which will become more important and add more value as we move into architectures and technologies which support the business in their goals of bringing products and services to the market as rapidly as possible, with minimal risk. We will see a shift towards testing the transformed business operation, the business processes, the way people interact with the systems and processes and the information it provides, and therefore mitigating the risks and increasing the benefits of business change.

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Category: Software Testing