87: Joe Colantonio: Test Automation Trends for 2016 and Beyond

Test Automation Trends for 2016 and Beyond

Don’t let your testing efforts fall behind — its time to get ready for the new year. In this episode, I share my insights about upcoming test automation trends in testing gleaned from my popular TestTalks podcast interviews. Discover the skills, best practices and frameworks you need to know to stay employable in a changing dev/test world.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• I remember the days when QA testers were treated almost as second-class citizens and developers ruled the software world. But as I was creating this presentation a funny thought occurred to me: we’re all testers now.
• Much of this is driven by the shift-left strategy of testing as early as possible in the development process. This helps your teams focus on quality from day one of your project, rather than waiting for defects to be uncovered late in the software development lifecycle. With more and more companies making the shift left in their development process, testing and automation are no longer just QA activities—which means that the roles of developers and testers are beginning to blur.
• With the Internet of Things era now upon us, there are going to be new security concerns and attacks that we’ve not previously seen and need to prepare for. 
• A good way to quickly identify risk in your IoT application’s infrastructure is to use the OWASP Risk Rating Methodology, where: Risk = Likelihood of attack, multiplied by what the impact would mean to your application and your business if that risk was exploited
• I recently interviewed Jeff Sussna on an episode of my TestTalks podcast. Jeff is the author of Designing Delivery: Rethinking IT in the Digital Service Economy. I really liked his analogy that as we build complex digital systems that are broken down into microservices and become more scalable, we are gradually shifting away from the world of so-called complicated systems as we start having relationships between systems of engagement and systems of record.
• I realize that a lot of attention has been paid to the shift-left transformation many organizations are going through, but I also think that making a shift-right with proactive monitoring and alerting after you release your microservices into the wild is going to be just as important.
  

Resources to Find Test Automation Trends
Key Indictors

• Indeed
• Indeed Trends
• Google Trends
• GitHub Trending repositories

Tools

• Predictive Analysis – Hp AppPulse
• Visual Validation Tools – Applitools 

Reports used:

• Akamai Performance Trends 2015
• World Quality Report 2015-16
• Zephyr 2015 Survey
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation

Interviews

• Paul Gerrard
• Johan Haleby
• Matt Wynne
• Peter Kim
• Adam Carmi
• Michael Sage
• Steve Hazel
• Jeff Sussna
• Jonathon Wright
• Brian Okken
• Neil Mansilla
• Troy Hunt
• Dave Heaufffner
• Todd H. Gardner
• Richard Bradshaw

Full Sauce Labs Webinar 

Connect with Joe

• Twitter:@jcolantonio
• Blog: joecolantonio.com
• Company:TestTalks

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