We asked software testers, QA analysts and test managers for their 2020 software QA & testing predictions. Below is a collection of their responses. Thanks to everyone who contributed an idea! Please note that we have lightly edited a few submissions to help with clarity. We have not included predictions specific to vendors or tools given the small data set, but given the interest, we will consider a future survey in that area so we can provide a good snapshot of trends. SECURITY “Security Testing will continue to become a primary focus!” – Lisa Boden “Security and Vulnerability testing would be a biggest thing in 2020 and future. With thousands of attacks happening within a minute, QA role would be even bigger to make sure to test against such and various attacks. Better skills needed in white box testing.” – Mahesh HEADLINES “Highly publicized defects and security compromises will bring about a renaissance in the area.” “At least one software disaster with significant loss of life. A series of hurried releases will cause several businesses to lose a lot of value. None of these will impact the boards of these companies.” “Initial quality of many SW products will be getting worse overall.” “2020 is the year of vision and clarity. Given the overwhelming amount of big data in today’s world and the effort it takes to get to quantitative data in order to make important decisions, I feel quality analysis and assurance will make a major push to the forefront in business. It needs to.” – Bonnie Lee Miley ROLES “The gap between a developer and a test engineer is blurring. There are literally no testing jobs in the company or the division I work for. There is only one position that is becoming the need of the hour and could breakthrough in 2020 it is Productivity Engineering. So what is Productivity Engineering (PE): To put it simply, the tools that you build to take software from concept to completion with the highest quality possible is productivity engineering. PE teams are expected to architect and build frameworks, deployment pipelines, setup tools, dashboards. In the fast-paced world, a good PE team is one that enables frequent code pushes with appropriate tool engineering to test everything automatically. PEs are expected to know DevOps, DevSecOps, Performance Engineering, to build a complete test and deploy the eco-system.” – Sundaresan Krishnaswami “Software testing will be more crucial in relation to address the increased technology and consumer awareness. It will be important to continuously strive for high quality standards so as to sustain and increase the growth in the marketplace where change is the only constant these days. Test automation will reach another level in terms of implementation and feasibility to cater needs of software industry. And also as we all know that QUALITY ASSURANCE is an eternal process for any kind of software product or service.” – Nikhil Dave “All QA’s will be called software engineers as the name QA will be a termed a company-wide standard, testing is now everyone’s role, and automation is a programming skill.” – Justin Zimmerman “We, as Testers, need to evolve with innovation and agile thinking to close gaps with the business and the rest of IT.” – Nora “Testing will continue to journey into more technical roles, including testing specialization in areas like Devops, PaaS, Iaas etc. Leading to better lifecycle and platform resiliency.” – Travis Reed “QA trends are still growing but the centralized QA role will be taken over by the Scrum Team. Test Automation is still the most important tool for QA as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery is getting popular.” “The need for testing expertise in Agile & DevOps teams will continue. In particular the demand for more technical expertise in testing roles will accelerate. Testing roles will become more comfortable with AI and codeless automation. There remains much work to be done in shifting testing left. Test data will continue to be a challenge.” – Michael D. Sowers “QA expectation will be increased.” – Yugandhara Chaudhari “A need for more SDETs and fewer manual testers.” – David Peterson “No change until executive management stops treating the Testing organizations as a cost without benefit. Additionally, until development managers start attending the CTFL classes with a subsequent improvement in Unit Test focus, the system testing groups will always be behind the 8-ball.” – Ed Weller PROCESS “More cloud SW companies with low risk products will be following the approach of testing in production and rapidly detecting the bugs using telemetry, feedback and user reporting, and addressing the bugs via cloud deployment.” “Cleaner hand offs for Testing Teams (Use of Workflows).” – Nancy McCLanahan “Better awareness of the differences between output checks vs. tests. Wider acceptance of the fact that the worst time to formalize testing is at the beginning of a project.” AREAS OF FOCUS “Digital Technology, Test Automation, and Security testing are the ones to watch out for as trends that take off in 2020. I feel that Traditional testing is beginning and will continue to fade away in the upcoming years. I think the area that will really surprise everyone is Artificial Intelligence.” “Higher focus on API testing driven by increased usage of APIs.” – Andrea Spoehrer “Heavier usage test automation in CICD pipeline tools like Jenkins to improve software delivery efficiency and provide more proactive production monitoring and alerting.” – Andrea Spoehrer “Software testing will be called App testing, and job postings will ask for App, API, Web, and Unit testers as well as programming language experience.” – Justin Zimmerman “Companies will spend 4x what they did in their budget as they add Software engineers who specialize in testing languages.” – Justin Zimmerman “More and better Automation.” – Nancy McCLanahan “Stronger use of AI/ML to assist with test creation and automation.” “Automation will continue to be high priority and still be 5+ years away from being real.” – Brian King “Automated testing will increase.” “There will be more push for automation, but also a focus on manual exploratory testing.” – Brian Miller “More enhanced with AI (including becoming experts in AI, particularly in relation to software QA & testing), to allow Software QA Testers / Engineers to focus more on “quality” (i.e., Exploratory Testing / less rudimentary tasks); as well as integral, concerning DEVOPS collaborations.” – Travis Garnett “Improved Automation rate. Need for testers with specialty in development.” “Software QA and testing will expand even more. With everything being program/system based the need for quality software products will rise. Automation doesn’t cover the look and feel from the user perspective. So there is a need for software QA Testing.” “Quality Engineering will continue to grow with a focus on incorporating AI into the SDLC. Vendors with Testing offerings will be challenged to deliver on ‘true’ AI in their testing solutions – not just rules engines re-branded as AI. Innovation that gets us closer to making effective Continuous Testing a reality.” – Joel Singh “More need for machine learning test expertise.” – Joel Robinson “QA resources will pursue advanced skills in technical automation to support increase in automation efforts.” – Andrea Spoehrer “Most apps are going to go on cloud. So CI/CD testing knowledge, Cloud testing is a high priority for all testers.” – Naveen V “Not much will change in the coming year. Focus on automation will continue.” “AI-powered testing, Test automation and RPA’s convergence, support of Continuous Testing Platform emerging to TestOps, API and microservices.” – Jyothi K “Artificial Intelligence in Test.” – Mustafa Kasapoğlu “API testing will continue to grow as more software systems move towards serverless architectures. The idea of QA teams dedicated to black-box testing will continue fading away as DevOps practices continue being adopted at a larger scale, increasing the need of white-box testing and automation. As a result of this, there will be a higher demand for highly specialized SDET roles in which engineers take both development and testing responsibilities to assure reliability, optimization, and better unit testing in a TDD environment.” – Diego Cubero “Machine Learning along with Artificial Intelligence.” “Security Testing in Agile Teams will be in demand for continuous integration or continuous delivery.” – Rosco Adams “Roles will be clearer than past.” – Yugandhara Chaudhari “Focus on mobile and digital testing.” – Yugandhara Chaudhari “More AI and machine learning involvement, more test automation integration with DevSecOps.” – Marwan Obeidat “More DevOps and AI.” “An increase in automated testing.” – David Peterson “Continued growth and diversification of managed services.” – David Peterson “More and more automation with devs doing more testing on their end.” “The trend of going away from using dedicated manual test teams will likely continue increasing pressure on manual test professionals to move on and transition to automation, DevOps, support, coding or other roles.” “ML/AI in test automation.” “Heavier emphasis on Augmented Reality mobile applications.” – Daniel “As a part of a mobile quality assurance team I think there are a lot of challenges that will face the field as many technologies have been implemented to the new devices like 5G which will lead to lots of changes and enhancements to the other services as well. With this insanely fast internet speed, it will encourage the users to experience more staff and will also encourage the development of new features and functions. It’s a matter of fact that testers need to be updated with these new technologies and understand how to test these huge amounts of new features especially from the user’s perspective.” – Mohamed Hefni “Software testing industry will move to more development and high skill practice where people want to test more on integration and identity and access management solutions where needs a solid skills on tools and development and programming to build up testing solutions and push more towards CI/CD process. Lots of Microservices and automated deployment solutions will come to picture where tester needs to be more aware and comfortable with DevOps practices and [tools]. And also confidence on a programming language will be ore must because testing will move more towards backends, APIs and services since most of big players will open their platforms in open platforms to others to develop frontends on behalf of them. So UI testing will be a lesser market since there will be more requirement toward APIs and services.” – Dharshana Warusavitharana “My 2020 prediction for software QA is that it will move more towards DevOps and Automation. In addition, we will see more apps becoming web-based and less GUI’s being developed.” – Michael Troynel “QA and testing will be moving towards bringing in design thinking into its practices and moving it toward left into overall cycle.” – Rinku Sheoran “More automation & engineering skills will be required.” – David Fuller “The growing market for applications and software will only increase the need for software testers. The infrastructure for automation testing will need control as the scope of automation testing increases.” “2020 will be a Year that depicts best software testing practices like Automation and DevOps integration.” – Michael Troynel “Test Automation and Open source tool will play a significant role in testing process.” “More DevOps and AI.” “More focus on automation testing.” – Ajay Nayak “Test Automation Scope will assume center stage.” “Continuous deployment will drive testing.” “DevOps integration with testing.” “AI Testing.” – Piyush Patel “AI and M&L improving automated UI tests.” – Son Hoang “Automated tests for all levels due to CI/CD.” – Son Hoang “Further leveraging tests which have been fully generated by AI to augment current testing.” – Kevin Surace “AI-related QA testing technology will start to make an appearance.” – Jezzrishaz Carr “QA & Testing is going to be big deal in 2020. I recommend people to gain more and more knowledge on “Testing Fundamental” & help to implement in Agile Projects / Scrum Team / Kanban Teams. Note, All Project Engineering methods like Agile (Scrum), Kanban, talk about Development & Delivery only, they rely completely on “Basic Fundamentals of Testing”, as basis for Delivery Quality increment / product.” – Jayesh Salgaonkar “Test automation (standing up testing frameworks) will continue to be a desired baseline skill for ‘good’ Testers to have. Employers will seek out those with programming experience. API testing will be a must-have skill.” – Kimbley Griffin “More automated test covering higher percentage of the code base.” – LisaAn
