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To maintain their competitive edge in 2024 and beyond, telecom companies have to stay ahead of emerging industry technologies. QA serves as a linchpin in this process, helping ensure the smooth implementation of innovations.  

In this article, we’ll take a look at the key telco trends for this year and explore a QA strategy to launch high-quality telco software in an era of unprecedented change. 

Navigating the trends reshaping telecom industry in 2024 

Trend #1. 5G  

Surpassing 1.5 billion connections by the end of 2023, 5G has firmly established itself as the fastest-growing mobile broadband technology of recent years. This statistic underscores the immense potential that 5G holds for transforming connectivity worldwide. By 2030, the GSMA professionals predict that 53% of the population will be using 5G, 35% — 4G, 8% — 3G, and 1% — 2G. 

Telecom trends 2024

Source: The Mobile Economy 2024 

The reach of 5G networks continues to expand across various regions from urban centers to remote rural areas while offering ultra-fast speeds, low latency, and high capacity.  

Moreover, the advent of 5G is driving innovation in various industries. In healthcare, it facilitates real-time remote surgeries and high-definition video consultations between patients and healthcare professionals. In entertainment, 5G delivers immersive virtual experiences that allow users to enjoy multiplayer games with on-the-fly responsiveness and minimal lags.  

As the adoption of 5G-enabled devices and services continues to grow, telecom companies should focus on ensuring seamless network performance, smooth operation of mobile and web applications and computing centers, and strong security to provide customers with the full potential of 5G technology. 

Trend #2. Broadband connectivity  

2024 marks a significant milestone in the expansion of broadband connectivity. Consumers are witnessing a proliferation of options for accessing the high-speed Internet driven by advancements in terrestrial wireline, terrestrial wireless, and satellite technologies.  

Nowadays, Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) and Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) satellite Internet are gaining momentum, particularly in remote regions. These technologies help offer viable options to traditional wired broadband services, bridge the digital divide, and extend access to previously inaccessible areas. 

Trend #3. AI-driven solutions  

AI-driven solutions are now becoming increasingly prevalent in the telecommunications industry, enabling operators to: 

  • Optimize network performance. By adjusting routing protocols and network topologies, AI-powered networks can adapt to changing conditions and traffic loads, ensuring consistent user experiences. 
  • Enhance cybersecurity. By analyzing network traffic patterns and identifying suspicious behavior, AI-driven security systems can proactively mitigate cyber attacks, protecting sensitive data and infrastructure from harm. 
  • Deliver personalized services to clients. By leveraging customer data and behavioral insights, AI helps telecom companies tailor service offerings and recommendations to individual preferences, increasing their loyalty and receiving more revenue opportunities. What’s more, with AI seamlessly integrated into chatbots and personalized AI assistance, they can elevate their client support. AI-driven networks enable efficient problem-solving and service sales without human intervention, minimizing operational expenses. 
  • Ensure predictive maintenance. With AI at the core, telcos continuously monitor the state of their equipment, analyzing statuses and identifying anomalies in network performance. By leveraging AI algorithms, they proactively resolve issues before they impact customer experience, reducing downtime and enhancing overall reliability. This data-driven approach allows them to predict potential failures and take proactive measures to address them with the hardware, including cell towers, power lines, and servers in data centers, ensuring seamless operations and uninterrupted service delivery.  

Driving successful adoption of telecom trends with the help of QA  

QA is indispensable to ensure the successful implementation of telecom trends and the reliability of IT products. Let’s explore key testing types, helping deliver high-quality telco software. 

All tests can be devided into two groups: 

  1. Functional and non-functional testing 

Performance testing 

Performance testing holds a pivotal role in guaranteeing the seamless operation of critical systems responsible for delivering telecommunications services. By meticulously subjecting telecom solutions to stress and load tests, companies can ascertain whether they are able to promptly respond to a myriad of subscriber requests. This involves scrutinizing both client- and server-side functionalities, ensuring that vital components, such as billing and CRM systems, efficiently receive and process requests. 

Performance checks help telco operators release highly reliable software while delivering exceptional user experiences and maintaining customer satisfaction. 

Functional testing 

Functional testing ensures that all features of telecom products work as intended. It extends to verifying applications designed for customers, user support systems (chatbots or live chats with operators), back-end software for telecom, data centers, CRMs, ERPs, and additional services (media streaming platforms). 

This involves testing various scenarios, inputs, and outputs to verify the correct behavior of the software. For instance, validating the functionality of invoicing processes. 

As part of functional testing, UAT helps ensure the seamless integration of new systems, modules, or integrated solutions within telecom businesses. While traditionally associated with third-party integrations, UAT testing extends beyond this scope to encompass newly developed systems or modules as well. 

The aim of UAT is to validate business requirements, verify functionalities, and assess user experience across various applications and platforms. For instance, in the integration of self-service portals and mobile apps, UAT testing enables QA teams to simulate real-world usage, such as managing accounts, viewing usage details, and paying bills. Additionally, it allows verifying the usability, performance, and security measures implemented to protect customer data and transactions. 

Security testing 

Security testing is paramount to safeguard sensitive customer data and safeguard against cyber threats, considering the extensive network and cloud infrastructure involved. Telecom companies should be highly vigilant about potential data leakage and breaches, as they handle end-user financial and personal information. Moreover, with numerous entry points into telecom networks, including interconnected software, like CRMs, billing, and operational systems, comprehensive security testing is a must-have. 

By conducting penetration testing, businesses simulate real-world attacks to identify potential weaknesses in telecom systems, such as weak authentication mechanisms or exposed network ports. 

To uncover entry points for cybercriminals and assess the safety posture of telco infrastructure, companies can introduce vulnerability scanning tools, including Acunetix, Burp Suite, and Nessus. 

Test automation 

Telco providers can automate any tests, but it’s more profitable to automate repetitive test scenarios, reducing manual effort and accelerating the QA workflow.  

To enhance testing coverage and efficiency, telecom providers leverage automated regression testing. By automating test processes, companies perform more tests in less time, significantly boosting coverage and accuracy while neutralizing the risk of human errors. These automated scripts can be reused repeatedly, optimizing overall testing efforts and ensuring comprehensive coverage across software updates, patches, and configuration changes. 

  1. Testing based on the product type 

OSS/BSS testing 

As OSS and BSS form the backbone of telecom services, it’s mission-critical to enable their seamless running. OSS/BSS testing encompasses a range of QA activities tailored to validate the functionality, reliability, security, and performance of telco systems, which are responsible for key functions, involving billing, customer management, and network operations. 

With OSS/BSS checks, businesses also verify the accuracy of billing calculations for various service plans and validate the CRM system to make sure that customer information or service requests are accurately captured and processed. 

Migration testing 

It’s imperative to test the data and readiness of the system before moving to new OSS/BSS systems, such as billing or CRM platforms. This process involves migrating and validating large volumes of data to ensure seamless integration and prevent disruptions to routine subscriber activities. Additionally, it’s necessary to address security vulnerabilities and optimize performance to uphold uninterrupted subscriber activities. 

Cloud testing 

Cloud computing plays a pivotal role in modern telecom operations, enabling companies to scale resources up and down, such as networks and servers, as well as storage on-demand. Leveraging cloud infrastructure, telecoms can keep and process vast amounts of user data remotely, ensuring cost efficiency and global reach. 

Therefore, businesses can introduce cloud testing to assess the reliability, scalability, and security of telecom products delivered through cloud infrastructure. 

With cloud tests, operators can also confirm the security posture of cloud-based telecom solutions, including data encryption, access controls, and compliance with industry standards. 

To conclude 

The telecommunications landscape is continuously evolving. 5G, broadband connectivity, and AI-driven solutions are set to redefine this sector in 2024.  

To implement these trends with confidence and assurance, businesses can encompass a comprehensive QA strategy that involves performance, functional, OSS/BSS, migration, UAT, cloud, security, and automated testing. 

Reach out to a1qa’s team to get support in ensuring the high quality of your telecom software. 

As companies navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of medical technology in 2024, it becomes imperative to stay attuned to the latest industry trends, helping revolutionize patient care and eHealth services.

However, to realize the full potential of these innovations, businesses should focus on quality assurance to smoothly implement them. Stringent QA practices serve as a linchpin to ensuring seamless integration of these cutting-edge solutions into existing healthcare systems while allowing companies to meet the highest standards of security, compliance, and reliability.

Let’s look at the predictions of the most impactful digital health trends for 2024!

Trend #1. Generative AI

Generative AI presents a promising avenue for numerous tasks within the healthcare area both related to administrative functions and care delivery. It helps streamline workflows, optimize sleep monitoring, improve radiological imaging, and better predict clinical outcomes. It can be especially valuable in:

  • Conducting smart diagnostics. AI-powered solutions use data from electronic health records, imaging, patient conversations, biometrics, and wearable devices to assist doctors in making accurate diagnoses.
  • Creating personalized treatment plans. AI tracks an individual’s sleep, nutrition, exercise habits, environmental influences, and vital signs to enable a comprehensive understanding of patients’ health needs.
  • Managing population well-being. AI processes large sets of information, identifies risk factors, and analyzes the prevalence of disease within specific demographic groups to improve health indicators.

Another use of generative AI in 2024 is customizing medical products and services. According to McKinsey research, about 1 in 5 US consumers prefer to receive personalized offers and recommendations. Thus, with gen AI, healthcare leaders will be able to provide more tailored experiences, foster greater end-user engagement, and increase patient satisfaction.

Trend #2. Cybersecurity

With the proliferation of digital medical platforms and the increased exchange of sensitive patient information, safeguarding data against cyber threats emerges as a top priority for the healthcare industry.

Just look at these daunting statistics: the number of data breaches in eHealth increased by 93% from 2018 to 2022, with the average cost of one leakage reaching $4.9 million.

Therefore, organizations should adopt robust cybersecurity measures, including encryption protocols, multi-factor authentication, and systematic security audits, to protect end-user privacy, prevent malicious attacks, mitigate the risks of unauthorized access. It will also help uphold consumer trust, ensure regulatory compliance, and maintain the confidentiality and integrity of sensitive medical information.

Trend #3. AR/VR

The AR/VR market size in healthcare is increasingly growing. According to Statista, in 2022, it totaled $2.3 billion while is expected to reach $25 billion in 2030.

AR/VR market size in heathcare during 2022-2030

Source: Statista

And it’s not a surprise. Companies invest in these technologies as they bring numerous benefits to the table and can be applied for:

  • Medical education and training

AR/VR can simulate realistic medical scenarios, allowing healthcare experts to practice surgeries, clinical procedures, and diagnostic skills in a safe and controlled virtual environment.

  • Remote consultations

Telemedicine has become an essential component of modern healthcare delivery, enabling people to access medical care from home at any time. AR/VR technologies offer more immersive and interactive experiences for both patients and healthcare providers. With the help of AR/VR technologies, patients receive personalized treatment plans to address their concerns, while healthcare providers can conduct examinations remotely.

  • Complex surgical operations modeling

Professionals can use AR/VR to visualize patient anatomy in three dimensions, plan surgical activities, and imitate arduous procedures before performing them in real life, reducing the risk of errors.

  • Anxiety treatment

1 in 5 US adults suffer a mental illness. However, only 47.2% of them received the required therapy. AR/VR can bring significant benefits as it promotes a comfortable and risk-free environment for receiving treatment and confronting fears.

With AR/VR innovations at the core of their business strategies, companies can stay ahead of the curve while enhancing the delivery of patient care, improving clinical outcomes, and revolutionizing medical training.

QA practices to implement 2024 eHealth trends with ease

With these trends in mind, we’ve compiled a checklist, featuring 6 key testing types, to assist you in navigating through incorporating eHealth trends in a hassle-free manner. Take a deep dive!

Testing type #1. Cybersecurity testing

Conduct comprehensive safety assessments to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities in eHealth apps, safeguard patient data against unauthorized access, and ensure the confidentiality of sensitive information.

Testing type #2. Compliance testing

Validate adherence to relevant healthcare regulations and standards, such as HIPAA, FDA, and GDPR, to mitigate legal risks and maintain consumer trust and confidentiality.

Testing type #3. Integration testing

Ascertain that different modules, databases, and external systems within eHealth products communicate smoothly to mitigate the risk of integration failures and data discrepancies.

Testing type #4. Performance testing

Assess the speed, scalability, and reliability of eHealth software under different scenarios to detect and eliminate performance bottlenecks and ensure consistent and responsive end-user experiences. In case your app is integrated with AR/VR, assess how well it operates under real-life conditions.

Testing type #5. Accessibility testing

Confirm that eHealth solutions provide inclusive and equal access to medical services, including their AR/VR features, for individuals with diverse needs, involving those with disabilities or language barriers.

Testing type #6. Functional testing

Ensure that healthcare products and embedded AR/VR elements within them meet specified requirements and operate as expected while user interactions, data processing, and system workflows have no inconsistencies.

QA checklist

Follow the link to download the checklist.

Briefly

In 2024, healthcare providers can leverage these industry trends — generative AI, cybersecurity, and AR/VR — to stay one step ahead of market competition and innovate the delivery of patient care.

As the process of incorporating tech tendencies into current workflows entails several hurdles, businesses should focus on QA practices to ease the path. They include cybersecurity, compliance, integration, performance, accessibility, and functional testing.

In case you’d like to get professional advice on improving the quality of your eHealth solutions, get hold of a1qa’s team.

In the first part of our article, we revealed how companies could obtain their business objectives by focusing on QA trends, such as:

  • Shifting beyond traditional test automation to maximize the benefits
  • Embracing Agile practices to strengthen competitive edge
  • Prioritizing value over speed to drive strategic business outcomes.

Let’s look at three more software testing methods that are paramount in 2024!

Trend #4. Adopt a security-first approach to fortify business resilience

With the average cost of a data breach coming to $16 million last year, 47% of the World Quality Report (WQR) 2023-24 respondents ranked cybersecurity as a top priority for 2024 to prevent potential system vulnerabilities and improve its overall reliability.

But sensitive data failures aren’t just about financial losses. In 2023, 88% of businesses faced reputational damage, 87% — encountered business continuity issues, 86% — lost their competitive advantage, and 79% — were unable to acquire and retain employees.

Source: Annual Data Expose Report 2023

So, what QA best practices can help companies cultivate a culture of safety awareness and mitigate the risk of cyber threats?

  1. Integrate security testing into the CI/CD pipeline to detect weak points early on and swiftly remediate them while reducing the expenses associated with addressing flaws in post-production. Additionally, it allows you to run automated tests on code changes, build creation, and ensure consistent testing across diverse scenarios.
  2. Implement comprehensive security policies, covering such aspects as password strength and rotation frequency, access control levels, safe document handling practices, and regular security checks. This assists in fortifying company’s defenses and promoting a culture of vigilance against potential threats. To quickly respond to cyber events, businesses should regularly update an incident response plan and test security protocols.
  3. Leverage DevOps practices to establish security perimeters and risk-free environments. This approach ensures continuous monitoring and mitigation of potential vulnerabilities, enhancing overall safety posture.
  4. Adopt security-focused code reviews to create robust processes, prevent loopholes in the software and systematically scrutinize code for weaknesses.
  5. Conduct regular security audits, including penetration testing, vulnerability and compliance assessments, to evaluate the effectiveness of existing safety measures, protocols, and software. As hackers develop new sophisticated methods to penetrate systems, it’s mission-critical to ensure that the audits are designed in line with the latest trends.
  6. Establish an education program to ensure employees adhere to security protocols and remain informed and vigilant.

Trend #5. Introduce cloud testing to improve software reliability

Eliminating the need for significant upfront investments in physical infrastructure, deploying applications and services faster, reducing time to market, scaling up or down based on demand — these are some of the core reasons why businesses adopt cloud servers.

As migrating to the cloud alone doesn’t guarantee system security and reliability, 82% of WQR respondents consider cloud testing a must-have. It is indispensable to validate the functional and non-functional aspects of applications in the cloud environment and ensure they withstand unexpected outages and cybersecurity threats. Companies may also introduce migration testing to guarantee seamless data transitions, prevent downtime, and exclude information losses within the cloud.

The final choice of a testing strategy depends on specific business needs, existing infrastructure, budget considerations, and the desired level of control. For instance, 58% of organizations selected a hybrid option due to cost optimization in 2023.

Trend #6. Stick to QA sustainability to minimize environmental impact

In the pursuit of technological excellence, the imperative to align quality engineering practices with environmental sustainability stands as a crucial trend.

Recognizing the escalating impact of IT on the planet, 97% of companies actively integrate sustainability into their QA processes to prevent environmental harm (WQR). While 2,016 C-level executives surveyed by Deloitte have acknowledged that it also has a positive impact on brand reputation (52%), customer satisfaction (44%), and employee well-being (42%).

So, how can organizations seamlessly weave sustainability into their QA practices, ensuring a commitment to environmental responsibility across the entire software development lifecycle? Below are some recommendations to follow.

Tip #1. Develop and track comprehensive sustainability metrics for the organization

Having clear sustainability KPIs enables companies to quantitatively assess their efforts, identify areas for improvement, and demonstrate progress toward reducing their overall environmental footprint.

Tip #2. Adopt test automation

Test automation can significantly reduce the environmental impact of software testing by streamlining and optimizing the QA process. While creating automated scripts may initially require energy, the long-term benefits include minimized manual intervention, resulting in lowered energy consumption associated with human-operated QA activities.

Tip #3. Implement eco-friendly test environments

Leveraging eco-friendly solutions, such as virtualization, containerization, and emulators, aids to reduce the need for physical hardware, decrease energy expenditure, and contribute to a more sustainable software development lifecycle. Thus, businesses promote resource efficiency, reduce environmental impact, and foster a culture of eco-conscious QA practices within the company.

Tip #4. Rely on shift-left testing

By shifting testing earlier in the development lifecycle, organizations identify and address issues sooner and can reduce resource utilization by minimizing the need for extensive testing later on.

In a nutshell

To stay competitive in a fast-changing business landscape and attain the desired outcomes in the coming year, companies may rely on critical QA trends: shifting beyond traditional test automation, embracing Agile practices, prioritizing value over speed, adopting a security-first approach, introducing cloud testing, and sticking to QA sustainability.

By integrating these practices into their processes, organizations meet the evolving demands of the IT market, reduce operational expenditure, accelerate software releases, and boost CX.

Connect with a1qa’s team to get professional QA support tailored to your specific needs.

Whether your business is navigating cost-saving endeavors, striving to generate more revenue, or on the brink of a transformative pivot, the role of QA is paramount to achieve these results.

By employing software testing trends that will shape this year, companies can tailor their unique pathways and efficiently attain the desired goals.

Let’s get to the point!

Trend #1. Shift beyond traditional test automation to maximize the benefits

By reducing costs, streamlining testing efforts, and improving accuracy, test automation has become a cornerstone in modern software development and QA processes. Moreover, the respondents of the World Quality Report (WQR) 2023-24 state that with automation 54% of them mitigated risks, 52% — enhanced test efficiency, and 51% — decreased the number of live defects in the previous year.

By leveraging test automation, businesses can rapidly execute repetitive and monotonous tests, thus saving hours of manual effort. This accelerates QA workflows, allowing for faster releases of high-quality software and rapid adaptation to changing market demands.

While traditional test automation brings plenty of benefits to the table, companies can maximize them by implementing additional toolsets, namely AI-based and low code/no code.

With AI-driven test automation, organizations have a possibility to:

  • Enhance software testing processes. By leveraging machine learning algorithms, AI-based automation identifies complex patterns of IT solutions’ behavior and can predict potential defects at the initial SDLC stages.
  • Refine test maintenance. AI-powered automation can adapt to changes in the software and adjust test scripts as the IT product evolves. This capability aids businesses to reduce the labor hours required by QA experts for script updates, ensuring that the testing process remains efficient in the face of continuous development and modifications.
  • Optimize test execution. By intelligently selecting and prioritizing tests based on several factors, like code changes and historical defect data, AI algorithms streamline test case execution. Thus, companies speed up test runs, focus on high-impact areas, and pay attention to the weakest parts of the software. This approach makes it possible to identify bugs early in the SDLC, contributing to faster releases and shorter time-to-market.

Although AI-driven test automation holds tremendous potential in revolutionizing QA workflows with enhanced speed and efficiency, there are notable nuances to consider. For example, AI models require ongoing monitoring and refinement to adapt to evolving software changes. In addition, implementing AI-empowered automation involves significant upfront costs related to infrastructure, training, and tool adoption.

Low code test automation provides organizations with:

  • Simplified project start. Low code/no code automation provides a streamlined starting point for projects, allowing teams with diverse skillsets to seamlessly introduce test automation. This accessibility facilitates a smoother onboarding process, accelerating the integration of automated testing into projects without the barriers posed by complex coding requirements. Moreover, its out-of-the-box structure simplifies test creation and execution, reducing the time and efforts required to initiate and manage QA activities.
  • Accelerated test script development. With no code/low code automation at the core, businesses can create and execute test scripts without the need for extensive programming skills. This speeds up their writing, allowing teams to faster respond to changing requirements and tight deadlines.

Low code automation still requires QA automation specialists to assist from a technical perspective, including the execution framework support. In contrast to traditional test automation solutions built on open-source free toolsets, codeless tools often come with a price tag, potentially offsetting the perceived budget savings.

By adopting modern test automation methods in 2024, organizations will be able to launch a high-quality IT product at speed while meeting (or even exceeding) end-user needs, reducing operational expenditure, and minimizing risks. However, to attain these goals, companies should carefully consider both the advantages and challenges associated with evolving testing approaches and align them with the specific requirements of the project.

Trend #2. Continue embracing Agile practices to strengthen competitive edge

A staggering 80% of companies worldwide are now leveraging Agile practices. The driving force behind this surge lies in the business benefits it brings, with 52% of respondents accelerating time to market and 31% mitigating risks through Agile implementation.

However, this transformative journey isn’t without its challenges. A significant hurdle for many organizations is a skill gap: 60% of the 1,750 IT executives interviewed for WQR grappled with a lack of coding abilities and 57% of them faced a lack of knowledge of Agile techniques.

Source: World Quality Report 2023-24

To address these issues, companies should:

  • Invest in training programs to empower QA teams with the right skillset, enhance their coding competences, and improve their ability to effectively contribute to Agile processes.
  • Introduce a shift-left testing approach to identify and rectify software bugs at the nascent SDLC stages, thereby eliminating expensive post-launch defect fixes and refining the overall IT products’ quality.
  • Integrate with DevOps/DevSecOps to foster a seamless CI/CD pipeline, execute automated test scripts on different environments, ensuring faster delivery of reliable applications and the adoption of security practices throughout the entire software development lifecycle.

Trend #3. Prioritize value over speed to drive strategic business outcomes

Since many companies are already moving at a fast pace, their priorities have shifted from speed to identifying risks and minimizing them, maintaining financial stability, and securing organizational reputation.

To shift towards a result-oriented mindset and focus on client-centricity, 71% of companies incorporated value stream mapping (VMS) in 2023, as per WQR 2023-24. This approach helps analyze, streamline, and optimize business workflows (from initial idea to final software launch) to boost customer experience.

In part 2 of the article, we’ll explore more QA and software testing trends, helping you attain the desired business objectives in 2024. Stay tuned!

To get professional QA assistance in enhancing your software quality, reach out to a1qa’s team.

As we approach the culmination of 2023, it’s time to take an opportunity and reflect on the wealth of knowledge that has transpired during a1qa’s online roundtables.

Let’s cut to the chase!

Unveiling the importance of a1qa’s roundtables for IT leaders

Recognizing the paramount importance of fostering a dynamic exchange of QA insights and best practices, a1qa hosts a series of monthly online roundtables designed for top executives.

These exclusive sessions help bring together diverse IT experts to deliberate on topical QA-related issues, such as quality engineering trends, test automation, shift-left testing principles, among others.

Roundup of 2023 a1qa’s sessions

The first quarter roundtables overview

During this period, participants discussed three relevant topics — “A practical view on QA trends for 2023,” “How to get the most of test automation,” and “Dev+QA: constructive cooperation on the way to project success.”

Analyzing QA trends helps business executives to proactively shape their QA strategies, ensuring they are in sync with the industry’s evolving landscape. While automation assists them in accelerating IT product’s delivery, enhancing its quality, and reducing operational expenditure.

Also, the attendees talked about the best moment for QA to step into the SDLC stages and methods to make the communication between Dev and QA more efficient.

The second quarter roundtables overview

This period was marked by three vibrant conversations:

  1. “QA for complex software: tips for enhancing the quality” — IT peers shared the challenges they encounter when testing sophisticated systems and the ways to overcome them.
  2. “How to release a quality product within a limited budget” — C-level reps exchanged practical experience on mapping software quality expectations to a QA strategy and optimizing QA costs.
  3. “How to improve QA processes with shift-left testing principles” — participants discussed how shifting QA workflows left allows businesses to identify and fix defects early on while speeding up the release of top-quality applications.

The third quarter roundtables overview

“A closer look at the field of automated testing” took center stage during the 3rd quarter, emphasizing how to derive more values from test automation supported by AI and behavior-driven development.

The fourth quarter roundtables overview

During the last quarter of 2023, IT executives have already engaged in two insightful conversations — “How to organize testing and increase confidence when starting a new project” and “Rough deadlines: how to deliver better results in less time.”

At the October event, the attendees revealed the best QA approach to choose to be confident in a project’s success from the outset, optimize ROI, and reduce business risks. The November roundtable helped the participants voice their ideas and share real-life cases on meeting tight deadlines without compromising software quality.

Thanks for being part of our roundtables in 2023!

To sum up

Our journey through the diverse and insightful roundtable discussions hosted by a1qa’s professionals with in-depth QA and software testing expertise throughout 2023 has been a testament to the company’s commitment to fostering knowledge, collaboration, and innovation in the ever-evolving landscape of IT.

From exploring emerging QA trends to delving into the nuances of automated testing, each session has played a pivotal role in helping IT executives shape future strategies.

Need support in refining the quality of your IT solutions? Reach out to a1qa’s team.

The article was first published on a1qa’s LinkedIn. To read more about trends, QA news, and tech, follow our LinkedIn page.

Today, the boundaries between the digital and physical worlds are fading at the flip of a switch. People already use AI-generated avatars when communicating via social networks, follow the latest fashion trends in the virtual runways, receive medical assistance through digital twins, and enjoy virtual concerts.

We owe these magnificent experiences to the metaverse. It’s a new, decentralized place that connects people across the globe, provides impressive brand engagement opportunities, generates novel workplaces, and simplifies our lives. It’s not surprising that by 2030, the metaverse market size will boom reaching $678.8 billion!

However, while unleashing countless capacities, this new computing era is still rather complicated. Before running with the bulls, it’s a good idea to better understand what Web 3.0 is and what benefits it offers for businesses. With this knowledge, companies can make smart decisions for introducing Web 3.0 software and confirm its highest quality.

Therefore, in this part of this article, we’ll discuss the essence of Web 3.0, and in the second – how QA helps deliver exceptional customer experiences. Let’s go to it!

Introduction to the new computing era

Within only 3 decades, the Internet has made an impactful journey from sending texts to visiting holiday destinations and sightseeing in virtual reality. Obtaining a bird’s-eye view of the concept of Web 3.0 is easier by checking out the evolution of the Internet:

  • With Web 1.0, people witnessed the advent of the first browser and static HTML pages with little interaction and data gathered from a static file system.
  • During the Web 2.0 phase, interactivity came to the forefront. Due to the emergence of multiple social networks and blogs, people turned from content consumers to creators disseminating information around the world.
  • Web 3.0 – a fully decentralized ecosystem for open collaboration and accessing data, apps, and multimedia – provides stunning, personalized experiences for engagement between humans and machines via AI, ML, and other latest technologies.

With more opportunities for personalization, front-runners such as Bentley, Mastercard, Disney, Shopify, Wendy’s have already taken leading positions in applying this trend. For instance, Zara has showcased its first collection for both people and avatars, while Thomas Cook launched a special initiative for tourists allowing them to choose trips using virtual reality.

Top 7 advantages of Web 3.0

Being a significant step forward in the advancement of the Internet, Web 3.0 is all about the following:

On the way to Web 3.0

1. Decentralization

With a focus on blockchain technology and the absence of a single control unit, decentralization allows peer-to-peer interaction and data storing. It also provides opportunities for secure transactions and logging in without being tracked.

2. Legal

Smart contracts are self-executing agreements. Therefore, buying or selling assets has become much easier and faster, as there’s no need for diverse intermediaries, such as banks. Smart contracts facilitate checking, control, and the execution of an agreement between a buyer and a seller. They are highly secure due to encryption and apply computer protocols to automate tasks, which increases the speed of business operations.

3. Artificial intelligence

AI enables faster-than-ever real-time processing and analysis of large data amounts, which can considerably improve capabilities related to decision-making, image recognition, or determining fake information. It can also contribute to improving online user experiences due to a more accurate search, analysis of consumer behavior, and personalization.

4. Advanced connectivity

With Web 3.0, people from any part of the world and anytime can seamlessly stay in touch with one another due to the round-the-clock availability of the digital ecosystem. As the Internet has become an indispensable part of our daily activities, users can remain connected from a car or any wearable device.

5. Semantic upgrade

To improve user experience, the new semantic web focuses on enhancing the capabilities of search and analysis due to a better understanding of the meaning of words and overall context rather than using keywords or numbers.

6. Better engagement

The evolution of AR/VR technology contributed to the metaverse boom shaping new ways of interaction and superior user engagement. Regardless of the location, age, appearance, or income, people can seamlessly create ideal avatars and come together to network, practice sports, play games, learn new things, travel, shop, receive medical treatment, do business, work, and much, much more.

7. Uninterrupted service

Suspension of accounts won’t be a problem anymore due to the fact that all the information is stored in diverse remote nodes, with multiple backups. This prevents the failure of servers or attacks of malicious intruders.

Web 3.0 for business: is the game worth the candle?

Although it’s still under development, Web 3.0 can become a game-changer for businesses across the globe. By providing impeccable digital experiences, companies can turn their end users into brand ambassadors who will promote their companies in ways no one has ever done before regardless of any geographical barriers. This word-of-mouth approach will contribute to increased brand awareness and improved sales.

In addition, organizations can capture valuable client feedback in the metaverse that demonstrates their emotional responses and the level of engagement in the moment, so that companies can access their genuine attitude and quickly fix any problems.

Considering the above-mentioned benefits, Web 3.0 software can enhance operational efficiency and help businesses win new customers. Of course, provided that the IT solutions work as intended and contain no critical or major flaws.

Soon we’ll deliver the second part of the article dedicated to ensuring the quality of Web 3.0 software. Stay tuned!

Reach out to our experts to talk about your QA related issues.

Emerging technologies help organizations worldwide to digitize and progress faster, drive operational efficiency, enhance customer satisfaction, and strengthen their brand identity ― all to meet desired business outcomes.

Take, for instance, the metaverse. This technology provides better opportunities for businesses to interact with users from anywhere in the world, conduct meetings or educational sessions with colleagues, and design impressive recreational areas to play games. No wonder its global market revenue will increase by 14 times and comprise almost $680 billion!

Or another example ― is genomics. It can assess human DNA and its structure to detect hidden health diseases or possible disorders in the future. Its great potential is demonstrated by the growing worldwide market size that will reach almost $6 billion in 2028.

However, the implementation and usage of advanced technologies often complicate digitization journeys because of their overall sophisticated nature. To simplify that, organizations may, among other things, rely on their thorough testing, which also helps prevent issues in the production environment, accelerate time to market, and optimize QA budgets.

How to attain maximum efficiency during this process? We suggest improving the testing workflows with the top 4 industry trends described in the article:

  1. Ensure sustainable quality engineering to minimize environmental harm
  2. Set up an automated-first approach to reach desired outcomes faster
  3. Consider a quality engineering strategy to support emerging technologies
  4. Adopt Agile and DevOps to improve the development process

Trend 1. Ensure sustainable quality engineering to minimize environmental harm

Open-minded companies tend to shift testing left to detect issues early in the SDLC, speed up testing cycles, lower costs, and improve cybersecurity. However, there is another significant benefit of focusing on software quality ― attaining sustainability. The more companies emphasize software soundness, the better they can operate without harming the environment.

The World Quality Report 2022-23 (WQR), which surveyed 1,750 IT executives across diverse regions and sectors, mentions that when sticking to sustainable quality engineering, organizations can enhance brand value (47% of respondents), increase overall revenue (46%), and even better employee recruitment and retention indicators (33%). Most importantly, executives think that sustainable IT will positively impact social and economic aspects, e.g., energy efficiency.

Source: World Quality Report 2022-23

Unfortunately, only in half of the cases do companies succeed in reaching set sustainability targets during software development. They already make a difference by relying on the cloud, test optimization, test automation, verifying customer journeys, performance, and CX.

In addition to these measures, they can prioritize a quality assurance process, initiate it at the earliest development stages, quantify environmental influence by configuring software performance monitoring solutions, and consider sustainability from the design stage.

Trend 2. Set up an automated-first approach to reach desired outcomes faster

Test automation remains an indispensable part of continuous testing and Agile-driven workflows and contributes to speeding up testing cycles, decreasing costs, and improving testing coverage.

Nevertheless, it’s difficult for the WQR interviewees to obtain the expected test automation benefits ― only 55.1% set up continuous integration and delivery, 53.4% managed to scale down QA team size, and 53.4% boosted test coverage.

When it comes to implementing automated workflows, quite often, organizations confront two major obstacles ― poor planning and its separation from the development process.

To improve the situation and optimize QA efforts, companies can focus on:

  • Adopting test automation already at the requirements creation phase
  • Designing an accurate implementation plan
  • Analyzing tooling efficiency
  • Betting on highly skilled SDETs
  • Creating a long-lasting product development strategy.

Trend 3. Consider a quality engineering strategy to support emerging technologies

The latest technological innovations arising at a rapid pace help businesses simplify daily operations, deliver digital transformations of diverse sizes, scale on demand, enhance both customer and employee experience, and stay successful despite high market competition.

For instance, already today, the cloud helps organizations improve cybersecurity levels, ensure data recovery opportunities, and increase overall flexibility; the internet of things (IoT) contributes to decreasing expenses related to infrastructure and boosting deployment speed; AI/ML optimizes routine processes, forecasts failures, ensures personalized customer experience, and more.

This year, the WQR respondents stated that their current IT strategies rely a lot on such technologies as blockchain and Web 3.0 (85%), digital twins (78%), and the metaverse (69%).

Without a focus on software quality during their implementation, multiple business risks can arise, especially those related to cybersecurity, growth, and staying ahead of the competition.

To cope with them, organizations can:

  • Attract seasoned QA experts who have in-demand skills, e.g., automated, cybersecurity testing, AI/ML
  • Consider introducing DevSecOps to enable high software resistance to cyberattacks from the early development stages
  • Design an effective strategy for smooth adoption.

Trend 4. Adopt Agile and DevOps to improve the development process

Organizations that jumpstart a cultural shift towards Agile and DevOps improve the quality of their delivery, attain faster and more frequent releases, speed up the process of obtaining feedback, and enhance the levels of customer and employee satisfaction.

The journey to embracing agility is complicated and requires the support of experienced QA engineers who possess skills related to test automation and CI/CD toolkits, performance and cybersecurity testing, deep knowledge of the industry, and can become full-fledged members of cross-functional teams. According to the WQR, organizations still lack professional quality engineers who can assist in infusing and developing Agile workflows.

To simplify the transition, companies can embed test automation along with performance, cybersecurity, or integration testing, consider the toolkit in advance, take care of appropriate quality metrics, and continue betting on skilled people.

Closing

Today, companies more often give preference to advanced technologies to improve organizational performance and keep up with increasing market competition. However, their roll-out and further usage are far from being the easiest task.

QA and software testing can simplify it and contribute to accelerating QA activities and reducing expenses. To increase the efficiency of this process, organizations can consider industry QA trends to reach set objectives and ensure that end users are delighted with delivered IT solutions: test automation, Agile workflows, timely quality assurance for advanced technologies, and sustainable quality engineering.

Reach out to a1qa’s experts to ensure high quality of your software solutions.

In this blog post, we continue our conversation on how QA outsourcing helps optimize telecom’s quality assurance expenses.

In this article, we’ll cover the following:

  • What type of QA team to choose based on your unique telecom needs
  • Best practices for working in a multi-vendor environment and addressing challenges.

Dedicated or project team models: which one is the best fit?

Dedicated (DTM) and project (PTM) teams are business models, allowing the client to expand the capabilities of the existing internal team while curtailing QA costs. A DTM fits for long-term projects with a high degree of uncertainty (e.g., incomplete or missing documentation), where the product develops by iterations. PTM is good for smaller assignments, where the amount of testing scope won’t be as broad, and the goal is clear.

For example, if a telecom company develops a complex product involving several systems and software that regularly roll out new features and needs ongoing testing, then the DTM approach is the right choice. It helps attract domain experts with the right skillset who easily adjust to all project changes, set up and monitor the testing infrastructure and processes themselves, and propose improvements where possible. However, the choice of the final team depends on the main goal. So, if the primary aim is to accelerate the release of IT solution, the organization should introduce a dedicated test automation team.

Another situation: a telco provider has a billing solution, but it’s mission-critical to verify only one of its components, e.g., performance that won’t take more than half a year. In this instance, it’s more cost-effective to consider a PTM.

Engaging only senior specialists with vast experience in the QA field may be costly, as the statistics show the annual salary reaches up to $132,000. Involving both top and junior engineers may be the best path forward, creating a balanced team that works effectively while keeping the budget in check.

Establishing a multi-vendor environment: 3 challenges to consider

Since telecom programs often require the engagement of specialists with different competencies and skills, companies outsource multiple teams. Let’s imagine that TT&A, our hypothetical telco company, turned to two suppliers simultaneously to acquire software development and QA services. Going beyond traditional workflows and operating in a multi-vendor environment, the provider here would face several challenges.

Challenge #1 Environment management

If businesses want to maintain strict coordination, they must handle all managing and controlling activities. However, they should realize that these tasks take up time, possibly forcing a distraction from their primary responsibilities.

Another option is to transfer these activities to a supplier ― here, it’s vital to opt for the one who has already worked in a similar environment and has experience in monitoring and fine-tuning the workflow processes.

Challenge #2 Synchronization of processes and priorities

If suppliers are not aware of their priorities and the requisite task sequence, it leads to a lack of synchronization, slowing down all operational processes.

Companies should clearly set goals for each vendor before the work begins.

Challenge #3 Interaction between teams

Do the outsourced teams cooperate with each other? How effective is this communication? Make sure that vendors are not working in isolation, as this results in disharmony and delays with respect to the end product delivery.

Businesses need to hold regular meetings, helping providers cooperate and discuss the challenges at hand.

5 steps to establish an effective multi-vendor environment

Here is our step-by-step plan on how to manage the work of several third-party teams within a multi-vendor environment.

  1. Determining the project scope. Prior to reaching out to vendors, it’s core to define the main goals as well as the volume of activities to perform. This helps set the right priorities for outsourced specialists.
  2. Establishing proper metrics. Running a project without monitoring progress is extremely risky. KPIs enable tracking both vendors and processes as a whole: companies can set up qualitative benchmarks to measure the performance of experts involved and quantitative ones as well to ensure that everyone knows the proper scope of tasks and responsibilities to undertake.
  3. Setting up a one-team approach. When functioning in a multi-vendor environment, suppliers run the risk of not communicating with each other. To address this problem, the product owner can create a team culture by incorporating regular meetings that allow discussing operational issues and building better rapport. This improves overall productivity and helps achieve a common goal.
  4. Creating a report system. To keep the client informed about providers’ activities, it’s advisable to introduce a special procedure: each vendor makes a weekly performance report with a detailed description of the work done, problems encountered, and suggestions for solving them. This level of detail is all upside and only strengthens the process. Suppliers should also be involved in regular meetings to discuss challenges and ways to address them.
  5. Managing risks. To make each outsourced company assume proper responsibility, the product owner may adopt a set of regulatory guidelines and standards as well as penalties for non-compliance.

Bottom line

Outsourcing software test requirements to a trusted QA partner makes sense for telecoms. Doing so pays performance dividends as much as it economizes telco budgets allocated for ensuring smooth product roll out. A key takeaway to remember is that the QA vendor takes care of four core aspects highlighted above: employment process, software assessment, QA activities setup, team agility and scalability.

If you’re ready to boost your telecom product quality with professional QA support and expertise, reach out to the a1qa team. We’re here to help you hit benchmarks and achieve your business goals. Let’s connect!

Projections by the Market Analysis Report show that the global telecom market will reach $2,467.01 billion by 2028. That’s a lot of (valuable!) communication on the horizon.

To maintain a leading position in such a fiercely competitive market, businesses need to ensure each software roll out meets the highest standards of quality for their end users, and do so while staying within QA budgeting parameters. One of the most effective ways to achieve this process is by partnering with an outsourced team of QA experts.

In this article, we’ll cover the following:

  • Why companies should never skimp on software quality
  • How effective QA providers work hand-in-glove with telecoms to ensure best-in-class solutions.

Budgeting for QA: Stay wise when you economize

The telecom sector remains ascendant in the wake of the Covid pandemic, and continues to develop rapidly. As the tech that telcos provide to their customers keeps accelerating, so do expect end users when it comes to flawless connectivity.

This demand only reinforces the pivotal role that software testing plays in helping telecoms stay competitive. And the stats back this up: 61% of the World Quality Report 2021-2022 respondents from telecom companies state that QA has helped them enhance customer experience and security as well as achieve quality at speed.

Being complex and multi-component, effective, long-term telco solutions require adequate investments in QA. However, due to budget limitations, some companies scale back on functional software testing, which can lead to potentially devastating consequences, including damaged reputation, accelerated churn rates, lack of business growth, and worse.

Let’s consider three possible scenarios, demonstrating what may occur should you opt to skimp on testing software.

Scenario #1

TT&A, our hypothetical telco, has a billing and customer service system designed to offer a universal line of services for various types of networks. But their in-house QA team does not have enough expertise to perform full-fledged testing of the software, and it goes live with a range of critical and minor defects. As a result, churn rates balloon as unsatisfied users turn to rival IT products, shifting their purchasing power to companies whose software has no bugs and provides superior CX.

Scenario #2

In an attempt to cut corners, TT&A only conducts functional and usability testing. They decide to forego any QA tests concerning performance, cybersecurity, integration and so on. Trying to minimize QA costs, our fictional company suffered both short-term and long-term losses, because the lack of cybersecurity checks led to many vulnerable points through which hackers penetrated the system and captured personal data. And as we all know, this type of occurrence is not the work of fiction — data breaches can cost a company millions of dollars.

Scenario #3

Finally, imagine that TT&A has another telco product, designed to unite several core parts of the operation ― billing system, software for providing Internet access, accounting clients, and tracking invoices. After testing each module separately, they decide to omit comprehensive integration tests and verification. When the software was released, the system could not accurately identify users who had paid their bills and randomly cut off connectivity to certain customers.

Our examples point toward what not to do, but that doesn’t mean mitigating risk and optimizing performance requires blowing out your budget. Outsourcing QA tests to a trusted partner has been shown to drive up outcomes in software and application quality, and do so while decreasing costs.

How QA outsourcing helps optimize software testing budgets for telecoms

By applying professional expertise to the following four core aspects of QA, third-party vendors can assist telco businesses in decreasing expenses associated with assuring software quality:

  1. Software assessment. Does your team know precisely which checks are pivotal for your software? QA professionals evaluate the IT product and its specifications to wisely choose a comprehensive QA strategy, tools, and testing types ― all needed to fine-tune workflows, quickly detect critical defects, and refine the quality. At this stage, experienced specialists also ensure proper test coverage through test design techniques. To verify the app accurately, they consider the specifics of the telecom industry.
  2. QA activities setup. Establishing a QA process (especially from scratch) is time-sensitive and budget-consuming, involving investments in devices, toolkits, and workstations, and stopping a variety of major tasks. Possessing extensive expertise in telecom projects, third-party specialists take over the entire software testing cycle and perform all mission-critical stages: analyze requirements, plan, design, and execute tests, create reports, and so on.
  3. Team agility and scalability. Let’s say your QA team consists of 3 engineers, and the testing scope is constantly evolving. How long will it take to find and onboard a new specialist? These concerns can be effectively taken off your plate — by staying agile and adaptive to the needs of the moment, a QA vendor can easily and smoothly expand or reduce the team of highly educated experts with vast experience in telecom at any time.
  4. Employment process. The QA provider independently organizes the procedure for recruiting the most suitable specialists and onboarding them for the project. The annual salary of a test automation engineer is currently around $73,000 per year. When factoring this into the funds required for equipment and training, it’s easy to see how quickly costs begin to rise for a telco. A trusted vendor undertakes all these expenses, allowing you to focus on core business operations and subsequently increase ROI by producing a high-quality end product.

Source: Payscale

In Part 2, you’ll discover the difference between dedicated and project team models and challenges when working in a multi-vendor environment. Stay tuned and expect our next blog.

In case you’d like to optimize your telecom budget and refine software quality, contact a1qa’s experts.

How can telecom companies maintain market leadership in 2023? Adopting novel tech trends can be of help but it is a tricky process. So, how can businesses simplify it while achieving the desired outcomes? In the article, find out the 4 emerging telecom trends and 6 testing types that are pivotal to implementing them.

4 telecom trends to adopt in 2023: make your software unrivaled

Let’s see what trends will shape the future of the telecom industry.

Trend #1. No need to wait with 5G and 6G

Mobile ecosystems are constantly evolving, however, in today’s world, companies are in search of methods to make wireless communication even faster with higher capacity and frequency and lower latency. Even though 5G is still trending, many organizations are looking ahead and gradually introducing 6G, providing better throughput, higher data rates and reliability as well as unrivaled immersive experience when it comes to AR/VR.

Consider this: if 5G offered the speed of 1 GB per second (or with peak data rates of 20 GB), 6G will reach one TB, which is 8,000 times faster than 5G.

Source: Statista

Trend #2. Cloud introduction or amplifying the power of your digital ecosystem

Have you noticed the number of apps migrating to the cloud? Of course, business realizes that their target audience wants to access the software from anywhere. So, telecom companies are also looking for the ways to provide more flexible and scalable solutions with high computing power over the cloud. This is because the growth of such devices as IoT, AI, and ML has driven the demand for more powerful computing capabilities. Here, cloud computing assists in improving program resilience and efficiency, accelerating the digitalization processes, and easily transforming all flowing procedures to meet customers’ needs.

Trend #3. Network-as-a-service (NaaS) or having the network infrastructure without building it from scratch

Since building, deploying, and maintaining routers, WAN optimizers, and other network elements is a cumbersome process, organizations rely heavily on NaaS. NaaS removes the need to invest in network hardware and infrastructure, helping businesses avoid budget overruns.

As user traffic often varies and can exceed the expected limit, NaaS ensures that your network runs smoothly even during high loads and prevents system disruptions.

Trend #4. Edge computing or shortened response time

According to Statista, the edge computing market will reach $250.6 billion by 2024. By storing, processing, and analyzing data locally, edge computing provides higher performance, bandwidth optimization, low latency, refined security, and soundness for IoT, AR/VR, industry 4.0, and other devices possessing sensitive controllers.

It will allow cutting down on exploitation expenditure by reducing large volumes of data previously kept on the cloud.

How to take care of software quality when implementing telecom trends?

It’s critical to ensure a high software level. To achieve this, we see companies applying QA aimed at checking various system aspects and eliminating bugs in them.

#1. OSS/BSS testing

Integrating a myriad of devices, like servers, cloud-hosted machines, tablets, phones, etc., and handling large volumes of transactions, OSS/BSS systems should be able to function correctly around the clock. This allows verifying 3 key aspects of OSS/BSS software:

  • Performance. The number of flowing operations and users skyrockets from time to time, so for the software, it’s mission-critical to withstand all kinds of loads: from regular to peak ones.
  • Security. These systems are vulnerable to unauthorized intrusion, which often results in the leakage of clients’ and company’s private data.
  • Functionality. Can subscribers create, modify, and delete accounts? Can they easily perform all necessary actions, such as tracking and paying invoices? Functional verification assists in confirming that the OSS/BSS solutions comply with the stated requirements and simplify user interaction with the system.

#2. Migration testing

Just imagine this: you have a billing solution containing a slight calculation error. Sure, it’ll cause user dissatisfaction and 100, 1,000, or more customer support calls. Migration should be smooth without affecting the routine actions of subscribers.

The transformation of the telecom product, such as receiving new features, always requires the transition of a large amount of data from the source system to the target one. Migration tests help make this process seamless and ensure required data integrity while preventing its losses.

#3. Integration testing

Telecom software products have a complex structure and comprise a multitude of modules. Just look: one IT solution may include billing, customer support, and self-service systems as well as an integration platform.

But how to make sure that all of them seamlessly correlate with each other? Integration testing is of help in such situations that allow timely identify integration discrepancies in the app and ensure the proper functioning of interrelated modules.

Based on the entire system and its individual parts readiness and the desired deadline, companies may employ different integration testing strategies. For example, the big bang one is aimed at the systems in which all components are already interconnected to assess the integrity of the whole product. If the program isn’t entirely ready, it is better to start with low-level blocks by applying the bottom-up approach.

#4. Performance testing

When you need to combine several systems into a single one or the number of subscribers of your telecom software multiplies, putting performance testing at the core of a business strategy is a must-have.

So, what types of checks are helpful?

  • Load testing — to check that the system handles the required load.
  • Stress testing — to exclude program crashes if the number of users expands.
  • Volume testing — to make sure that the increased amount of data stored won’t cause software breakdown.
  • Scalability testing — to analyze how the telecom product responds to changes in architecture, the number of simultaneous subscribers, and generated requests.

#5. Cybersecurity testing

According to Deloitte, in 2020, cybercriminals stole the sensitive data of more than 500,000 people across the globe from video conferencing and sold it on the dark web. Quite an alarming case, agree? The most common attacks in the telecom sector, where 45% of all are cloud-based, include DNS (79% of companies suffered it in 2020), SS7, DDoS, and others, which ultimately lead to downtime, damaged reputation, and high operational expenditure needed to restore the software.

Well, to prevent breaches within telecom systems, companies make use of cybersecurity tests — conduct a vulnerability assessment, static code analysis, penetration testing, social engineering activities, and more — providing a safe experience for subscribers.

#6. Test automation

Testing telecom software may be time-consuming, especially if done manually. Adopting test automation is a logical choice to reduce test cycles, improve test coverage, and decrease QA costs as well as increase ROI from 37% to 50%, as stated in the World Quality Report.

Closing thought

In 2023, telecom companies may rely on 4 topical trends ― 6G, cloud introduction, NaaS, and edge computing ― to continue providing end users with a consummate digital experience.

And to take exceptional care of telecom software quality, organizations just call for QA and verify the following aspects: OSS/BSS, migration, integration, performance, and cybersecurity, as well as introduce test automation to accelerate the testing process.

In case you don’t plan to boost your telecom product quality yourself and need professional QA assistance, reach out to a1qa’s professionals.

The COVID-19 pandemic has expedited the adoption of digital technologies by many years. Forced to briskly switch businesses to online and continue operation against all odds, organizations had to introduce disruptive tech novelties — from AI and IoT to blockchain and augmented reality.

However, a digitization journey turned out to be challenging. According to BCG experts, 70% of high-scale transformations fail to reach their objectives. How can companies ensure overall process success and make their efforts pay off?

Among other things, they can place greater emphasis on QA. Focused on meeting quality gates and accelerating time to production, it helps attain bugless operation of secure and credible software.

To efficiently organize testing processes in 2022 and succeed in the “next normal” era, businesses can rely on 5 striking industry trends that we’ll highlight in the article:

  1. Keep adopting Agile and DevOps
  2. Attain digital transformation goals with quality engineering (QE)
  3. Rely on AI to obtain productive testing outcomes
  4. Automate intelligently to gain benefits faster
  5. Adapt test data and environment management to a global context.

Trend №1 – Keep adopting Agile and DevOps

To briskly respond to changing needs and deploy IT products with engaging CX, organizations stick to Agile and DevOps cultures oriented on delivering top-tier software with short notice through continuous quality improvement.

Despite the ongoing popularity of these approaches, World Quality Report 2021-22 (WQR) states that skill gap problems still prevail. For instance, one-third of 1,750 respondents experience the shortage of test environment, containerization, and test data skills. Whereas the other 44% of survey members marked the deficiency in the professional expertise of agile testing teams.

However, to optimize testing processes and simplify the way of implementing Agile and DevOps methodologies, companies can:

  • Test software as early as possible (a shift-left approach)
  • Automate more to deliver good-to-go code faster
  • Optimize test cases with the help of AI
  • Use automated dashboards to get a detailed view of quality.

To achieve maximum efficiency from the implemented approach, companies can put business priorities first and be more open-minding to adopt changes.

Trend №2 – Attain digital transformation (DT) goals with QE

Starting from 2020 and currently ongoing, the world is facing a boom in the speed of digital transformation journeys. Statista mentions that by 2025, the global spending on DT will reach almost $3 trillion! The trigger for its high demand is largely related to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has greatly expedited the DT velocity for about two-thirds of the interviewed (2,569 respondents in total).

However, the path to DT is intrinsically linked to implementing cutting-edge tech novelties like embedded software, blockchain, edge computing, and many others. To ensure high protection and efficiency of delivered IT solutions, companies rely on quality engineering.

Trend №3 – Rely on AI to obtain productive testing outcomes

AI implementation is gaining momentum globally. Experts highlight that by 2024, the worldwide AI market size will comprise more than $500 billion.

Finding its way into diverse industries, AI is already applied to deliver customer care services through chatbots, diagnose hazardous illnesses like sepsis, or even judge beauty contests.

WQR asserts that the QA industry also bears fruit from this technology, especially when it comes to a win-win tandem with test automation. Companies can apply it to create automated scripts as well as enhance their quality and reliability to improve time to market and increase the accuracy of a testing process by eliminating the human factor.

Other high-priority use cases of AI in software testing relate to predicting issues (42%), prioritizing tests (43%), and test environment provision (44%).

Trend №4 – Automate intelligently to gain benefits faster

For several years in a row, test automation has kept its leading positions amid the hottest QA services — experts state that by 2026, the global test automation market size will boom and comprise almost $50 billion.

Being the prime means of cutting delivery time, which is vital in the post-pandemic era, it enhances the quality of detecting defects, increases software security, and improves the testing process due to boosted transparency and monitoring of QA activities. ROI is another crucial benefit of its introduction. According to WQR, 50% of the interviewed IT representatives mentioned that their efforts are paying off.

Thus, it’s no secret that more organizations rely on automated QA workflows in their testing strategies. Which also has a hand in extending the pool of applied use cases, among which already today are continuous automation, self-healing, RPA, headless automation, scriptless approach, and many others.

Source: World Quality Report 2021-22

However, to obtain the maximum value from the test automation approach, organizations should always stick to the essential rule in this scenario — striking balance, as 100% automation is an elusive and senseless objective.

Trend №5 – Adapt test data and environment management to a global context

Not only did the COVID-19 pandemic affect all the industries and expedite digital transformations, but it also forced employees to work from home.

It resulted in the continuous decrease in the usage of traditional environments and a shift towards cloud-based ones, which are now leveraged by 23% of the WQR respondents. Virtualized, containerized, and on-demand temporary test environments are also gaining momentum. And despite existing bumps in the road, for instance, the need to make sure cloud- and legacy-based apps are in sync, more than half of the survey participants are optimistic about the overall visibility of the existing environments.

What concerns test data management, the number of IT leaders who marked that their teams continuously meet data security and privacy regulations enlarged to 55%. Also, more respondents are copying production data rather than synthesizing test data because of the process-related challenges.

In a nutshell

Brisk adaptation to changing circumstances has become a critical priority for businesses striving to stay ahead of the competition in the “next normal.” For that, they may strengthen the quality of software products with QA and focus their efforts on testing in Agile and DevOps. Also, at the same time supporting digital transformations with quality engineering, using AI to boost QA efficiency, automating to expedite deployment to production, and improving test data and environment management.

Feel free to contact our experts to get professional QA support.

While the crisis makes businesses across multiple industries accelerate digital transformation programs, most BFSI companies have already begun that before the pandemic. However, they should adapt faster keeping in mind the mass migration of users to online platforms due to increased competition and expanded software quality standards.

To keep up with such a high pace and enable business resilience, BFSI industry representatives should stay flexible and promptly adopt innovation. So, what is the starting point for this transformation? How to perform it effectively to stand out in 2021 and beyond?

Check out the top 6 trends and a four-step QA guide helping BFSI companies revamp their working processes and meet end-user expectations.

BFSI trends for next-gen software products

Within an overwhelming technological diversity, what aspects are the pressing ones bringing true value to the business in 2021?

Trend 1. Implementing open banking solutions

The introduction of the second payment directive PSD2 became a push for the development of open banking in Europe. In turn, this allows market players to gain access to the clients’ financial information while generating a sizable number of the system’s participants and provoking higher competition. Several countries have already presented their solutions, for instance, SGFindex in Singapore.

In 2021, BFSI companies will continue introducing open banking while increasing the variety and quality of services at a lower cost.

Trend 2. Automating SME support processes

The pandemic has also impacted small and mid-sized companies by increasing the lending rates, so that 50% of SMEs cease to exist. Enabling business continuity and addressing the costs challenges, financial entities are keen on developing business support packages within a high request for online support.

For example, the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) has been giving users the ability to interact with smart chatbots for several years, which improves the quality of service. The bank has also adapted its mobile app and Internet banking capabilities to support its online business.

Trend 3. Customizing financial services

Since 2019, CX has been entering the list of tech trends. Today, end users, especially Generation Z clients, have become more fastidious and require to be treated as individual customers rather than a segment.

So, financial companies need to apply deep data analytics and form a digital ecosystem to deliver a unique set of banking products based on end-user needs and preferences.

Trend 4. Empowering software with biometrics

Within an increased risk of facing cybercriminals, users need more advanced data protection methods while making financial transactions.

Statistics Market Research Consulting showcases that the biometrics market size will reach $76.64 billion by 2027. The authors of “Biometrics — Global Market Outlook (2018-2027)” also predict significant growth in the biometrics market in the coming years, becoming one of the most reliable options for ensuring the security of personal data.

But the use of unique physiological features in the authentication process goes beyond fingerprints or habitual Face ID. The iris of the eye, voice recognition, vein patterns can be utilized to confirm the identity as well. Another factor that increases safety is the use of survivability algorithms that distinguish humans from reproducible digital images helping end users be confident in financial products offered.

Trend 5. Enhancing global financial health

Did you know that about one in ten Americans cannot pay their credit card bills monthly, according to the study by Cornerstone Advisors? It makes sense that attention to personal budget stability will be in focus this year, and specialized software can become the desired tool for managing financial processes.

Even until recently, users gave preference to software based on their convenience. Soon the ability to maintain their stable financial position may come to the fore. We’re not only talking about information support, but also about the development of original software to optimize financial transactions.

Trend 6. Shifting to the cloud

BFSI is one of the most significant segments that apply cloud services within 16% of the global cloud computing market share.

Cloud computing market share 2020

Source: fortunebusinessinsights.com

Along with providing high scalability and flexibility of the system, moving to the cloud helps reduce the costs for maintaining corporate infrastructure.

To effectively implement cloud solutions, it is valuable to form a quality assurance strategy helping identify critical defects and prepare to go to market.

Four-step QA guide to adopt core trends

QA allows 66% of the World Quality Report 2020-2021 BFSI respondents to achieve the required test coverage largely due to a shift-left concept. To help navigate through incorporating trends with confidence, let’s delve into the 4 steps to make.

Step 1. Choose Agile to ensure continuous improvement

27% of the WQR’s reps prefer applying Agile in their BFSI projects. Even the 2% growth comparing to the last year shows that the change not only in the industry form but also in its fundamental processes.

According to WQR’s experts, to successfully implement digital strategies, about 80% of companies will begin to rethink their products, services, and formats of cooperation with vendors and customers.

Step 2. Design a QA strategy to test innovation

The global trend of implementing AI, ML, IoT, cloud services requires more sophisticated tools and exceptional expertise to obtain more value.

By improving QA practices, companies can test software with any business logic complexity supporting digital personality (a virtual user version becoming another venue for protecting personal data). To test it accurately, QA engineers use complex mechanisms even in a remote format.

Step 3. Accurately build the QA process

Before starting the software process, think over a QA plan. Which mission-critical testing types to include? How to prepare the testing environment? Which tools and methods for monitoring to apply? Is it better to rely on an in-house QA team or onboard an offshore one?

  • Then, move on to the testing process to evaluate:
  • Confidentiality and security of personal and financial data
  • Compliance of planned financial transactions with laws and regulations
  • Security of transaction processing
  • Speed of handling client requests
  • Coverage of customers’ needs
  • Usage of information from the client DB
  • Possible threats to the security system.

Make sure the QA team detects code defects at different levels: from individual modules to the principles of their interaction.

Step 4. Implement test automation to speed up product delivery

It’s no surprise that companies are increasingly using automation when developing QA strategies in the financial sector. Who does not want to accelerate t2m, reduce QA costs, enhance test coverage, etc., right?

However, test automation does not mean completely rejecting manual tests – this is especially true for UI, conducting exploratory and ad-hoc testing. A wise decision is to find a balance between automated and functional testing as well as automate at different SDLC stages not to miss anything.

Closing thought

The focus on online services and operations is shaping new trends in the BFSI industry. Implementing innovations with constant QA support helps businesses get confident in the relevance of the software in the market and ensure its high quality and reliability.

Do you wish to get advice from the testing team? Reach out to a1qa’s experts to get your BFSI software ready to go live.

The expiring year has brought in a novel, unexpected aspect affecting literally every sphere of our lives. Of course, we are talking about the “black swan”, pandemic, outbreak, and more terms defining the “what shall not be named.”

In 2020, companies have en masse embarked on digital transformation journeys, educational facilities and gyms have launched online sessions, travelers have switched to sightseeing in virtual reality. And a way more examples may be provided.

What do they have in common? Sure, technology lying at the heart.

Reversed business landscape has triggered out-of-the-box thinking, which often goes hand in hand with implementing innovations.

This is where QA comes into play. Introduced early in the SDLC, it helps avert product recalls or shrinking revenues.

But how to effectively organize your quality assurance ecosystem in 2021 to address the economic recession and still win the game?

In the article, we’ve focused on 5 main QA trends to consider for moving toward an optimistic business forecast:

  1. Evolve Agile and DevOps landscape
  2. Count on AI for continuous quality improvement
  3. Keep automating to support increased development pace
  4. Transform test data and environment management
  5. Rethink your QA budget to act wisely.

QA trend #1 – Evolve Agile and DevOps landscape

With the advent of a pandemic era and a great choice of apps to help get through it conveniently, users have become much more fastidious. So, the need for deploying catchy products has become overwhelming.

With that in mind, organizations get on with Agile and DevOps adoption aiming to downsize time to market and deliver software of superior quality. Despite the overall tendency of merging QA and development functions, World Quality Report 2019-2020 (WQR) affirms that 42% of IT business spokesmen noted a gap in professional expertise of agile testing teams. Meanwhile, another half highlighted the alignment of toolkit for automated verifications as the major hindrance.

Therefore, to ensure high software quality throughout and after Agile and DevOps transformations, organizations may :

  • Leverage test automation for accelerating QA activities
  • Involve software development engineers in test (SDET) possessing a sought-after skill set
  • Care of UX through continuous monitoring of production logs to detect issues prior to end users
  • Introduce automated quality dashboards to provide high process visibility.

But more importantly is to perform the transition in line with tailored business needs defined within the company.

QA trend #2 – Count on AI for continuous quality improvement

The Forrester research predicts that in the year to come, AI will face a boom. Organizations will utilize novel AI use cases like performing holographic meetings for remote work. A third of adaptive companies will invest in AI to cope with workplace disruption including, return-to-work health tracking, and more. Sounds impressive, right?

Promising also is the future of AI in a quality assurance field: 88% of WQR’s respondents emphasized that AI comprised the greatest growth part amid their test activities.

What’s more, despite current complexity caused by the lack of expertise or skills, companies already utilize new approaches to turn the tide. In particular, WQR highlights analyzing production incidents to forecast a future quality level and plan QA scope accordingly and generating and managing test data to extend test coverage by revealing its gaps.

Even quality assurance of sophisticated AI systems is marked by cautious progress. For instance, eHealth manufacturers create standards able to verify AI-enabled algorithms, while automotive companies use AI algorithms’ validation in advanced driver-assistance systems.

What can organizations undertake to increase testing efficiency through AI in 2021? Implement AI-enabled tools, introduce continuous improvement of employees’ skill level, and focus on attaining business objectives.

QA trend #3 – Keep automating to support increased development pace

Despite high volatility in released applications, test automation deployment continues to gain momentum. The number of IT representatives deriving advantages from its introduction enlarged in comparison with the previous year.

Test automation

Source: World Quality Report 2020-2021 

However, bumps in the road still occur.

Only 37% of companies admitted to obtain ROI in test automation tools. To ease maintenance of extensive automated suites and reach maximized scalability of tests, why not leverage scriptless automation toolkit?

Another continuous problem lies in the insufficient specialist’s level of expertise, which directly impacts on planning long-term strategies and overall QA efficiency. This tricky aspect may be resolved by hiring proficient SDETs with good development and test automation architecture skills, knowledge of AI, RPA, API, and microservices.

Introducing such talents into the team, pinpointing the most suitable and intuitive toolkit, relying on AI and ML in tackling technical burdens organizations may achieve the desired level of test automation regardless of frequent changes in the applications.

QA trend #4 – Transform test data and environment management

Businesses still face challenges related to test data and environment management.

However, an encouraging tendency is evolving: 29% of WQR’s respondents perform testing in on-premises environments, and this indicator is scaling down if compared with 2019. More organizations opt for cloud-enabled environments or containerized ones based on Docker or resembling technology. This shift is largely provoked by COVID-19 pandemic, as companies precipitate to attain digital transformation.

Still, to reap benefits from the cloud in 2021, it’s vital for QA teams to establish their appropriate governance to dodge unpleasant incidents like higher overall cost due to their untimely release.

As for test data management, 79% of interviewed mentioned that they build test data manually for each run, which is probably required to meet the needs of continuous automation. To surmount this hurdle, companies harness TDM solutions masking production data. In contrast, they may be leveraged more efficiently like developing test data sets able to help design business rules.

QA trend #5 – Rethink your QA budget to act wisely

A global pandemic has put its imprint on QA budget allocation: widespread domestic policies require working from home, therefore triggering a sufficient cut on travel expenses connected with business trips. Even more savings may be achieved through the adoption of cloud-based infrastructure.

Meanwhile, what are the areas that worth sufficient liquidity injections? WQR states, that in the forthcoming year, organizations should focus on two prevailing dimensions:

  1. Investing in innovations with ample potential like AI or test automation to attain cost savings in future
  2. Paying well for replenishing teams with sought-after members like SDETs.

Summing it all up

For many businesses this year has become the time for rethinking QA strategy to perform more efficiently in 2021 and obtain a competitive advantage. For that, it’s vital to concentrate on smart orchestration of DevOps reinforced by test automation and AI, improving test data and environment management, optimizing QA budget to meet the post-pandemic requirements.

Feel free to contact our experts to have a consultation regarding your software quality enhancement.

Annually, retail experts draw up lists of trends that are expected to shape the year ahead. However, the changes in the global context have affected the nature of the retail industry progress in 2020, giving the first place to developing technological aspects and, as a result, enhancing the quality of software solutions.

In this article, we are talking about six key retail trends for 2020 and explain how QA helps follow them accurately.

Increasing internal processes speed

Only in the USA, retail sales were expected to grow by 2.0% to $5.574 trillion in 2020. Still, the global outbreak with its tough predictability is making unexpected and unpleasant amendments to the retail industry development.

How can a company speed up the in-house processes to win the competition and enhance success rates? Take business operations to online and help the customers go online too.

Let’s have an example. Retail giants like Amazon have set high standards for the speed of accepting and processing user requests. There, it takes less than a day from a click on a site to unpacking an order.

Global studies testify how it is vital to decrease consumers’ time spent on getting what they want. More and more end users are ready to pay extra money for their time saved, raising the expectations bars high.

However, some things don’t change: as you can see below, the speed of loading pages practically did not modify in 10 years.

Page load time
Source: Httparchive report

In an unstable situation, it is essential to go beyond the expectations and do the utmost to level up the customer experience. With the growing needs of digital consumers, it’s high time to adapt the products in online space to end-users expectations and implement an individual approach.

Here is an idea of how. If the goods delivery speed highly depends on logistics, including multi-level collaboration across many services, development of logistics as a service, and more, than why not optimize this process and create the platforms that can ensure high-paced delivery?

This is where one can see the ever-evolving need to ascertain the flawless functioning of the software and identify performance bottlenecks as well as ensure that the IT solution can cope with the required load. To deliver a truly top-tier app, you can go for full-cycle testing encompassing the perfect match of required testing types like cross-browser, usability, mobile application, migration testing, etc.

Undergoing digital transformation

In recent years, by adopting new IT apps and fundamentally reorganizing internal processes, this trend has intensified its influence.

Retail companies that have already made a transition to the digital environment and adapted their businesses’ processes to the online space, embrace a larger part of the target audience. An additional advantage for many of them was the development of proprietary software products like mobile applications, digital assistants, etc.

Why isn’t it high risky now? For instance, the share of mobile traffic in retail is only growing. A 2019 study showed that 46% of U.S. users surveyed used mobile apps to search for additional information about a purchase or service and made at least one purchase last month. And with the rising use of mobile devices throughout the outbreak, the importance of assuring their quality is raising multifold to deliver the debugging software that astonishes end users. At a1qa, we conduct checks on real mobile devices from the 300+ device fleet to take into account all software versions.

Using Big data for analysis

Big data helps reveal relevant patterns and trends in users’ purchasing behavior, accurately predict the best prices, and plan sales activities. By investing in applying this technology, retail companies can understand their consumers better and deliver more personalized products by changing pricing strategies almost instantly and rapidly responding to market changes.

With this, retailers can avoid constant price reductions in a wish to be the first in the market.

Consider that working with unstructured datasets containing vast arrays of information involves evaluating their quality to get expected business results and build solid strategies. In this case, big data software testing can help ensure fail-safe performance, high data integrity, security, user-centricity of your IT architecture.

Implementing AR/VR technologies

Virtual and augmented reality have already been enhancing the online customer experience for a couple of years. Today, the development of VR- and AR-based solutions are most relevant when people around the world tend to spend more time at home. For example, IKEA uses AR-based features in its application so that users can place virtual furniture elements at home.

Such innovations serve as an example of frictionless commerce when the user takes a minimum of actions, and the process of choosing and buying a product is simplified.

However, the flip side of virtual reality is the high user’s expectations. In a short time, really great applications attract hundreds of thousands of new users. AR/VR testing helps protect sensitive user data against cyberattacks, ensure high user-centricity of UX and UI, ascertain that the software product can work under high loads, and more.

Localizing software product

Localization is especially relevant when scaling the retail ecosystem with the advent of new markets.

Many companies not only translate sites into other languages but also create independent digital platforms, taking into account the cultural and local characteristics of the region. It is not surprising that the majority of users prefer websites in their native language. While the poor-quality adaptation of the resource to the understanding of end users can lead to dissatisfaction, the decision is to conduct localization testing providing compatibility control with regional standards, GUI compliance, and uniformity of lexical and visual style.

Automating business processes

Reducing routine tasks frees up the resources of companies. Take Amazon Go stores that successfully operate without cashiers having 26 stores.

In the coming decades, the self-checkout systems are expected to become very common, and this is just one example of how the processes can be automated.
In the crisis, take some time to review, which repetitive processes can be automated, and take some care about them now to exit the unstable situation with new prospects.

Automation can also become part of the quality assurance process. Test automation is a wise business decision being a long-term investment in the future, helping repeat checks while minimizing the human factor and helping conduct testing at the scheduled time with minimal load on the server.

In uncertain times, by following these trends and being forward-thinking, the businesses in the retail industry can grow more actively. One of the most important vectors of efficient companies’ development is the attraction of technology and the progress of new IT solutions.

We can already say that the spread of the pandemic has accelerated the formation of a highly integrated digital retail network. Experts believe that we should expect the acceleration of transactions from 12% to 25-30% in the United States and from 25 to 60% in China.

However, the success of the software product in the market largely depends on its quality. QA can help maintain quality at the level that is necessary for users in the face of growing competition.

Would you like to evaluate the quality of your retail software product? Contact a1qa experts to do it right.

Every pre-New Year season is the high-productive time to plan things big and ensure that you are fully packed for the upcoming season. This is the very time when tech experts cannot wait to compare their QA expectations to the predictions.

So what is the running theme for 2020? Let us recall last year when the loyalty of the values-driven consumer was the foremost priority. By now, the front-row seat goes to achieving business growth. However, you should not be disappointed: providing consumer satisfaction or detecting defects before they release into production is still incredibly important.

QA and software testing objectives

Source: World Quality Report 2019-2020

Want to know more about key QA trends and recommendations for the upcoming year? Keep reading and identify the main points for the coming year.

Keep aligning QA with Agile and DevOps

We have been writing about this idea throughout the year and are repeating ourselves now: achieving high quality when developing applications is a challenge. Once you have started the continuous improvement, this process will be interminable.

How to provide updates at a faster pace and increase agility as well? Of course, implement Agile and DevOps. According to the latest World Quality Report (WQR) 2019-2020, only 1% of those who have gone through the adoption claimed that they haven’t faced any problems. The others admitted that the biggest issues that slow down the progress of successful Agile and DevOps realization are operational and business priorities, the technology stack, and the skills needed to work with them.

If the company has a clear vision of what its success should be like and what the main needs are, it will be painless to harmonize Agile and DevOps with the business.

The main challenges in applying testing to Agile is a lack of test environment and data and inability to get the right level of test automation. When the companies become more Agile and DevOps, they need smarter ways of automating and should give added value to testing’s role in the development cycle making it a part of the pipeline. For this, they need to onboard talents having the right skill set and train those specialists that don’t.

In line with the WQR, over half of the companies admit that they are satisfied with their skill levels in each testing area whether more than a quarter does lack skills in each of the aspects including test automation, performance, security, and more.

Focus on AI and Ml to bring efficient processes to the place

Initially, it might appear that last year the IT world representatives seemed to be very excited about AI comparing with this year. According to Forrester’s surveys, only 29% of global developers have been utilizing AI or ML software during 2019.

What about software testing? In 2018, 57% of the interviewed for the WQR said they applied AI in QA activities to help the teams test better, whether in 2019, the number is 42%.

Let us take a few minutes to see if “AI and everything” are that bad. Is seems that people still believe in AI but they are becoming more realistic about this issue and are only in progress of realizing the artificial intelligence landscape. In the latest WQR edition, we also see machine learning coming to the arena with double force. Have a look at these statistics: 58% of internal processes are using ML, which is almost double higher than the percentage of AI for that role.

However, AI is still a significant part of QA and will probably unleash its potential in the future and will most likely be applied to mitigate the risk of defects and areas of risk, create smart dashboards, etc. Talking about the talents that apply AI in QA, many companies have their in-house AI team but about 60% of respondents prefer to onboard external specialists. By now, AI-related skill set within QA has to be further expanded to get new knowledge in test automation, test data management, and so on.

Will AI keep its positions in 2020? IDC predicts that in five years, at least 90% of new apps versions will include embedded AI features. Though, Forrester assures we are to expect the last peak in AI funding in 2020.

Rethink test automation: make it a business-driven platform, not a capability

Test automation is not leaning back but it’s still a complicated activity. With the apps changing too much with every release, automation cannot keep up with this speed, and 65% of WQR respondents prove this statement. More than half of the IT representatives have difficulties in providing stable test data and environment not possessing enough skilled test automation talents.

Still, test automation can result in multiple far-reaching benefits.

Test automation advantages
Source: World Quality Report 2019-2020

But to change “CAN” into ”WILL”, next-generation automation engineers have to expand their development skills, knowledge in RPA (robotic process automation), TDD, ML, API, and microservices. As soon as the companies are ready to have the right people with the needed skills and to increase the amount of automation, it will be possible to reimagine it as a mature intelligent platform that will help focus QA on contributing to business values.

Pay special attention to security testing

This year, the importance of security was taken to the next level, and QA engineers are to assure with special accuracy that only secured code is deployed to the production.

It goes without saying that understanding of security issues is deeper than it was before. Therefore, security testing should probably show good results in being automated more than other testing types, right? Strangely, it is not. Relying on the WQR statistics, only 13% of security checks are automated, and that is the room for improvement.

Companies should dedicate more resources to getting over security challenges and ensure the safeness of the customer’s data according to GDPR, CCPA, and other protection rules. What can we do? Increase test automation adoption, run more tests quicker, and shift security testing left to reduce risks.

Reconsider test data and environment management

This year, we see that test data and test environments management continue to be quite challenging.

According to the WQR, only the third of companies test on permanent test environments. But what about their cost? Comparing with the last year (39%), 60% of the interviewed suppose the costs to be too high. Though, every cloud has a silver lining: test environments are becoming more visible and available.

The splinters of the test data management are to keep the information consistent for running the test scenarios and make sure it complies with various data regulations being anonymized.

In 2020, the companies should raise awareness and visibility of test environments by onboarding the right skills, try to build a CoE for test data management to create and maintain real-time test data from production systems.

Below, you can see the brief report made by the QA specialist at the annual a1qa summer conference on how to benefit from test design techniques.

Desıgn test techniques

Optimize QA costs

4 years ago, 35% of the budget was given to QA. In 2019, the percentage has decreased by 12%. Should that mean that software testing is not one of the most crucial IT budget areas? No.

In 2015, when companies were investing that much in QA, it was a long-term strategy that resulted in getting better results from new tools and techniques adoption. An increased amount of releases, delivery of quality at speed, and other factors that help achieve business needs are those items of expenditure that do determine the software testing budget.

The final word

As QA is becoming more business-focused and embedded with everything, teams have to expand their capabilities across test automation, test data and environment management, bearing in mind AI and security issues.

Have QA-related challenges? Drop us a note to get a free consultation with the a1qa specialists.

Software testing has expanded substantially from the manual approach since the 1980s. As much as the testing activities aims are altering, the QA experts have to expeditiously adjust to the numerous software testing sphere transformations.

The testing discipline will carry on augmenting. Accordingly, we’ve rounded up the top 11 tendencies that will determine the future of testing in 2019 and beyond.

Here’s what we suppose QA professionals need to focus on to stay ahead of top technology progress.

Internet of Things testing

IoT is one of the fastest developing technologies in the modern world. The latest World Quality Report (WQR) revealed that the number of IT respondents that somehow deal with IoT had risen from 83% in 2017 to 93% in 2018.

IoT devices and applications with the connection to the internet are to be tested for security, usability, and performance. Most IoT developments include such technologies as Near Field Communication (NFC), Bluetooth, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) to connect and enable communication. All these make IoT gadgets vulnerable to network-related threats that should also be recognized by QA engineers.

Artificial intelligence in testing

According to the Gartner’s 2018 CIO Survey, 1 in 25 CIOs has implemented artificial intelligence in their companies. Google, Facebook, Microsoft spend billions on artificial intelligence and machine learning initiatives.

Obviously, AI will grow further and it has its own role in testing as well.

AI can definitely streamline the process and make it smarter. AI-powered software testing can recognize the code changes, analyze them, and launch tests to make sure there are no mistakes. As of today, AI is widely used in test automation.

But in the future with the adoption of AI-powered testing, manual testers will be able to move forward their routine tasks, perform more of exploratory testing, thus reducing costs and bringing more value to the business.

In general, AI will change the profession of software testers and turn them all into test automation specialists.

But of course, this won’t happen overnight and the impact of AI on software testing is yet to be observed.

Increased adoption of Agile and DevOps practices

In DevOps, software testing starts from the very beginning of the software development lifecycle. As a result, most of the defects can be recognized at the earliest and the high-quality application will make it to the market sooner. This approach enables Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration.

No surprise, 30% of the WQR respondents claimed these methods to be a significant aspect of their today IT business strategy.

There’s nothing path-breaking about saying that the Agile and DevOps adoption tendency will keep on gaining momentum in 2019.

Big Data is getting bigger

Data can be very beneficial to organizations. Given its proper quality, of course.

Volume, velocity, variety – these are the 3 V’s that characterize big data. Considering the exponential growth of big data generated, software testing engineers will have to continue keeping their eyes on its quality.

With the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation has come into effect on May 25, 2018, more attention should be given to data privacy. And while GDPR is only focused on Europe, many companies outside it stated they would change their data policies accordingly to keep good relationships with their customer base.

Test automation (yes, again!)

Test automation has been the key trend in testing for more than 15 years already. It is hardly surprising that the purpose of QA automation has fundamentally changed – the point is to make a high-quality product as opposed to saving the resources.

68% of the World Quality Report respondents said test automation improved the test coverage compared with the previous year when the percentage was lower by 17% and by 28% since 2016.

In other words, the contribution of QA automation in companies increases. It has undeniable pros in cost savings, removing defects, transparency testing expansion. Test automation guarantees high-grade software is delivered.

And as test automation guarantees a top-notch quality of the software, its tools will be used further to perform both functional and non-functional tests. Testing engineers will concentrate their time and efforts on running experiments and exploratory tests rather than perform routine testing.

a1qa has developed an open-source framework – Aquality  Automation. See its main benefits at the short overview of the presentation done by test automation engineer at the 9th traditional a1qa conference.

The open-source way

Manual testing will stay

Regardless test automation is becoming more popular, manual testing has much to say to the industry. There’re still some spheres like design and usability, which require manual efforts. So yes, manual testing will stay longer with us.

Performance engineering & performance testing

We’ve heard it multiple times that very soon performance engineering will replace performance testing. What’s the difference between them?

Performance testing is about preparing and executing tests, while performance engineering is about understanding how all parts of the system work together and designing its best performance.

However, performance testing is not sharply falling behind the performance engineering. According to the World Quality Report, performance testing conducted in cloud environments has grown by 14% since 2016.

Delivery cycles will get shorter

DevOps, test automation, constant improvements in communication flow have one common goal – speed up releases.

In pursuit of willingness to take a proper place in the market and provide high-quality software organizations enlarge budgets to shorten delivery processes and quicken releases.

Of course, this puts (and will put in 2019) additional pressure on QA departments and make them find imperfections and supply the finished products more frequently.

Open-source tools will prevail

Easily accessible, resilient, and free of charge – open-source products are precious and extremely helpful for IT business.

Though they don’t give a sense of security. However, frequent usage by the community helps to discover and eliminate bugs faster than you can imagine.

Cloud will get more popular

The WQR survey mentions only 27% of all applications are non-cloud based. Today cloud computing is the groundwork for other tendencies like DevOps and IoT.

The public cloud is becoming more popular – its percentage in the number of clouds’ types has got higher by 3% since 2017.

The tendency goes further – respondents prefer to use different cloud service providers, so we see the multi-cloud popularity growing.

Running tests in the cloud has its many benefits: minimum efforts required (you don’t need your own infrastructure to perform mobile and web testing), simple accessibility, and high versatility.

Security testing becomes more crucial

With the broad use of smartphones, tablets, computers, and other devices, one’s got used to relying on them for transactions. It has made security testing more crucial for every company to store shared or accessed data safe and deter security violations.

The survey states, it has grown up by 10% since 2016. Since the confrontation between security and privacy continues to grow, this testing will remain an urgent necessity for many companies.

Summing up

Forewarned is forearmed. Considering all these tendencies, organizations and businesses have time and opportunities to implement industry best practices creating unique QA approaches and ensure the impeccable quality of their solutions.

Recent years have brought in a lot of innovations. Technologies have moved so far forward, and the progress is seen with the naked eye. All these recent alterations will definitely impact the sphere of software development.

And as always, business will want the high-quality product launched as early as possible. In today’s blog post we share the prominent QA trends for 2018 to help shape future plans related to the assurance of the software impeccable quality.

#1. Increasing role of DevOps and Agile

DevOps provides for close collaboration between development team and operations staff throughout all the stages of final product creation. According to the World Quality Report 2017-2018, about 88% of the companies used the DevOps principles in 2017, which is an obvious majority. DevOps and Agile together give you the smooth and fast development process and minimize the time and money spent on the product.

‘Applying DevOps and Agile will give you and your clients in the long run such benefits as acceleration of time to market and outage reduction, increase of quality and faster reaction to changes and defects.

Moreover, today SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) as an Agile for large teams is becoming more and more widespread. If we talk about our own experience at a1qa, we see that clients want to have QA engineers who are able to provide both manual and automated testing – cross-functional QA specialists, so to say. 

That’s convenient for both QA vendors and their clients. The former benefit from having one person who can perform multiple tasks and grow as a professional in various testing areas. As for the clients, they don’t need to spend additional time on knowledge transfer and communication’, says Vitaly Prus, Head of Agile Testing Department at a1qa.

#2. Ongoing trend on test automation

‘Test automation is a great method to shorten software lifecycle. Every client is eager to have time to market accelerated and cut the costs of the whole process.

However, automation should be applied wisely. If it’s an end in itself, there is no reason to use it. For example, fast changes in the product will make the automation process unnecessary and unreasonable. If the customer wants to automate testing process, it’s always worth estimating its practicability and figure out whether there is even a slight possibility of negative earnings’, Maxim Chernyak, Head of a1qa Test Automation & Performance Lab, talks about the trend.

However, test automation is under-exploited now as only parts of the QA process are automated. According to the World Quality Report 2017-2018, the average level of automation is about 16%.

#3. Open source tools

Today a big portion of IT companies accept the use of open source tools for testing process, which are easy to apply. Moreover, they are technology-savvy and offer great testing opportunities. You will definitely benefit from these solutions, as the expenses for your services will include only the costs for the actual work of your QA team.

#4. Security testing

Security today is of crucial importance for any product or system. Given the fact of the increased popularity of the IoT technologies, security testing became an inalienable part of the product development. Security and penetration testing services are worth using as hackers will continue seeking access to the IoT devices for destructive purposes.

a1qa pays a lot of attention to the security testing to assure that the protection of personal data must be implemented on the highest possible level.

‘IoT devices security is a pain in the neck for the developers of smart devices in 2018. It is reinforced by hackers’ interest in routers, cameras and other smart devices available through the Internet. Several botnets, which were used for DDoS attacks on various corporations, appeared in 2017. In addition, there is a trend for complicating and sophistication of the attack. Thus, the first versions of botnets simply gathered in password and usernames, however now they are able to compromise the device without knowing the username and password‘, Alexey Abramovich, Head of a1qa Security Testing Department, comments on the trend.

#5. Big Data testing

The expansion of Internet of Things (IoT) deals a lot with big data as laptops, home devices, various sensors and machines generating huge amount of data on a daily basis. IoT evolution, as well as digital revolution in general, plays a great role in Big Data world.

The Big Data testing will be in great demand in the near future. It seems that big data system testing will be easier as machine-learning models are becoming more sophisticated and are able to cope with great deal of data variety.

#6. Mobile testing

The number of smartphone users is increasing every year and it is expected to surpass the 5 billion mark by 2019, which will increase the mobile development and testing.

People tend to use their mobile devices for the activities they used to perform on their PCs. Considering the variety of services trusted to smartphones, customer experience and apps functionality become the most important things to check before the final release of the product.

‘As a number of mobile devices grow constantly, the number of mobile applications grow exponentially. Mobile applications are not only an additional customer acquisition channel, but they are becoming the leaders for this goal. What concerns the trends they are determined by the new technologies and innovations. For example, mobile games still stay popular, but AR technology will definitely increase the number of mobile games on the market in the near future. Apple, Facebook, Google use this technology not only in GameDev sphere – its use is much wider.

Another incontestable trend is blockchain technology which was a great deal of discussion in 2017. This technology became in high demand as it provides new opportunities and growth for businesses. However we should not forget about the other popular technologies, such as IoT, Cloud Based applications and E-commerce, which are still edgy’, Pavel Novik, Head of a1qa Mobile and System Application Testing Department, shares his thoughts.

#7. Performance testing vs. performance engineering

Today, we are moving from Performance Testing to Performance Engineering.

To amplify the chances for a successful release of the app on the market, user experience and performance issues must become the most significant things to consider throughout the entire development process.

‘DevOps and Agile practices couldn’t but influence the QA involvement. More and more often, the QA performance team collaborates with the development team, the functional testing team, and the business stakeholders. This gives an opportunity to move from simple performance tests to a deeper understanding of the way how all parts of the system work together. The use of true-and-tried practices and techniques during each phase of software development lifecycle enables the performance team to improve the software speed and robustness, ensure optimum performance given the business goal, which is the main objective of Performance Engineering‘, says Mihail Urbanovich, a1qa Performance Testing Manager.

We hope this brought together trends will help you make up smart plans in assuring high quality of your products.

The year 2017 is just around the corner. We guess it’s high time to remember the most common QA requests in 2016. Based on them we give our recommendations to software testing vendors to run successful testing in 2017.

Embrace test automation as integral part of testing

Test automation is still the best way to speed time to market, quickly test changes and not delay deployment.

“Today we observe the booming growth of test automation as a trend. How does it manifest? Well, obviously, clients have become more aware of the automation goals and advantages. The number of automation service requests for projects with QA in place also grows up continuously.

For the last six months we’ve received a significant number of requests to automate testing of the desktop applications (mainly for Windows). They are still not as many as the web apps testing requests but the number is very close to it. The driving force is the emergence of high quality toolsets that enable to solve complicated issues that were hard to solve before.

Mobile apps test automation has also grown in demand and this trend will likely keep gaining speed.

Open-source project Docker is used more often to speed up deployment of test environment. Docker offers to scale automation of various activities related to the software development, deployment and testing.

And the last but not the least important factor for test automation popularity is the opportunity to provide complex high quality solutions without being limited to the sets of automated tests only.

Now we offer automated solutions that are integrated with testing and bug tracking systems and enable to analyze test results. Summing up, test automation is becoming an integral part to continuous testing.”  – says Sergey Hamzatov, a1qa Test Automation Engineer.

Develop new service lines

Alongside with traditional services, we do constant research and develop new services to meet specific QA demands, for example, Baseline Testing. It enables to evaluate the current quality level of any IT product and propose a roadmap to its increasing.

Another non-conventional service is QA consulting, which is rather popular among those customers who need to develop QA processes or improve current testing strategies not to outsource testing needs on a regular basis and manage distributed teams.

Instill out of the box thinking approach

More and more often we have to deal with assuring quality of various IoT developments. They require testers to become real users for some time and try the most unthinkable scenarios. What we recommend is to start thinking out of the box.

How can a professional manual tester who runs routine tests regularly become more creative? There are some useful pieces of advice that might be of help to any tester:

  • Find out what the software under test is not expected to be doing. Try those things out.
  • The ‘what if’ should become the leading question of the software research. So you are finding yourself in the middle of Apple Watch testing. How will it act if an iPhone it is paired to runs out of battery, etc.?
  • If you can do anything in the system (meaning it allows you to) do so without question and despite everything telling you shan’t do just that.
  • If possible, get the system (or device) under test out of your working premises and try it in real environment.

Get ready for testing Big Data applications

Large companies often ask for comprehensive strategies to test big data systems that are too big in scope to be processed in traditional ways. And here again test automation comes to help us. Automation is one of the best means that can be used for testing big data apps.

Give priority to security testing

Security has been and is probably the most important aspect of any IT strategy. Nowadays we are getting ready to handle increase in systematic testing of all applications (mobile, web, desktop).

The cost of mistake also increases as users now are less forgiving of broken security. To stop the vulnerability trend, users, mobiles apps developers and testers should join their efforts. Users shouldn’t share their personal data and have to become smarter downloaders; developers must ensure the 100% code security, while testing engineers should identify threats to the app and help develop countermeasures.

We hope that our recommendations will help to shape your future plans and start efficient and productive 2017.

The growth of the mobile market is not new: mobile industry has been skyrocketing for the last decade as users spend more time on multiple devices and consume mobile content. Year on year, we see new trends in mobile testing that change the way we test software.

To move with the times, we at a1qa analyze the latest reports and surveys in mobile industry to be aware of focus areas, challenges, new handsets and operating systems.

Evaluating the data, we adjust our methodology and testing approach to deliver the top-notch solutions to our clients.

At the start of the year 2016 there appeared numerous forecasts regarding the mobile testing patterns of development. Now, as summer has come round, it’s high time we gave an eye on those predictions to see which of them have stood the test of time.

Daniel Knott is a well-known mobile testing expert specializing in test automation. Apart from his daily work, he’s also a blogger and author of several books on software testing. This time we’ll talk about modern trends and challenges in mobile testing.

Hi Daniel, can you please tell us about yourself, your current occupation and expertise?

Sure, my name is Daniel Knott and I am a mobile test engineer at XING AG, social network for business contacts founded in Hamburg, Germany. I started my career in 2003 as a trainee at IBM where I was already involved in a number of software development projects. Soon software testing became my passion and I started a career as a software tester for web applications. Later on I grabbed the opportunity to move into the mobile development and testing area.

When I took to test mobile applications in 2010, everything was completely new for me I started everything from scratch studying relevant tools and processes and I really enjoyed the freedom at this time. Since 2010 I have been working in the mobile testing field.

Currently I am a member of the Android platform team at XING where our most essential challenge is to scale the whole mobile development and testing to the whole company. To date, we have grown from 1 central mobile team to 7 mobile development teams contributing to the master branch of our iOS and Android apps. Every two weeks we submit a new app version to the app stores of the mobile platforms. And with this scaling many new challenges came up that we in the team have to handle.

My current task is to help the web software testers become mobile testers. Therefore, I created an in-house training to teach them all necessary skills they need for their daily work. Besides that, I coordinate the releases and test our apps both manually and in an automated way. So there is lots of work to do and more things will come up in the near future. No day is like the other and that is what I really like.

In your view, what are the main challenges in mobile testing?

For me, the main challenges in mobile testing are:

  • customers
  • mobile fragmentation
  • test automation

Customers are challenging because you need to know them. If you don’t know who your customers are you might have a problem developing wrong features. To handle the customer challenge in mobile it is very important to collect some data about your target audience: devices it uses, its habits and usage patterns.

If this is the first time you release an app, watch out for competitors and find out information about the target customers. If you have a web application that is already used by the customers and you want to provide them with a mobile experience, use the collected data from the web to create mobile personas to identify possible features. If you have apps in different app stores you can add tracking to your apps to gather information about your target customers.

With this knowledge you can also handle the second challenge in mobile testing, the fragmentation. If you know what devices are used by your customers, you can concentrate on developing and testing only on these devices.

A nice way to handle the device fragmentation is to create the so called device groups. For example, create three groups A, B and C. In group A add the most popular devices with the highest priority. Include the less popular devices in the Group B and the most unpopular in the Group C. With the help of these groups every mobile developer and tester can downsize the effort in testing on many devices.

The last challenge every mobile tester needs to handle is the mobile test automation. Mobile test automation tools are not that mature as their web counterparts but the tools are getting better and better. There are so many great mobile testing tools out there and the cool thing is most of them are open source and free to use. When choosing a tool the company must decide which of the available tools fits best into its software development environment, as there is no universal solution in the field.

Are there any trends in mobile testing that influence the way you work?

There are so many trends at the moment coming up in mobile but none of them infuence the way I work. But it may change tomorrow, so it’s important to be ready for new things and for changes.

However, there is something that impacts my daily work and this is the software testing community. There are so many great software testers out there who share their knowledge with the community to help others become better and this is great. There is always someone you can ask, e.g. via twitter or slack about a problem or solution to get almost immediate feedback.

What skills are vital for mobile testers?

The same skills every software tester must have. Apps are also software but with a different focus. Nevertheless, skills like strong communication, curiosity, critical thinking and creativity are vital for any mobile tester. There are so many ways to go in mobile testing that these skills are really important in order to become successful.

What is more, it is very important to be a constant learner. The mobile world is changing really fast and it is crucial to keep up with the market and the new features that are coming up every month.

Thank you, Daniel, for sharing your ideas with us.

This is the first part of the interview with Daniel Knott, read the second part here on our blog soon. If you want to learn more from Daniel, visit his blog.

The year 2015 is distinguished by multiple innovations and events in the app sphere. The two leading platforms, iOS and Google Play, have shown consolidation in the download and income streams. Google Play remains a leader in downloads, thus leaving iOS the main position in revenue shares. What new trends should we expect from the 2016, and how those in the mobile app testing services industry can prepare?

1. Introducing deep linking for easy app searching

Application searching is expected to become easier and behave more like web with the help of Google Now on Tap app. This could be achieved due to the introduction of deep linking, which is likely to decrease navigation drawbacks and simplify content discovery within apps. Google Now on Tap can make Android even more attractive for developers and enhance users’ engagement with apps.

2. New income stream for eSports

From 1999 to 2009, a large interest in rare live events burst due to the development of digital music. A similar interest for mobile gaming events is observed in the eSports industry. The year 2016 is supposed to increase a demand for competitive mobile gaming events thus helping game publishers gain new revenues as sponsorship and broadcast rights.

3. Implementing multiple services for messaging apps

Messaging apps are extremely popular and much more frequently used in Asia comparing with the West market. Amid combining messaging apps with other services like game or offline payments, the Facebook Messenger platform will attempt to change its strategy in 2016 to enhance the usage of messaging app and gain a leading position in this sphere. This is supposed to be achieved by implementing additional platform elements such as commerce and payments.

4. New consolidation growth in Asia

A wave of consolidation is believed to burst even further in the Online-to-Offline (O2O) commerce industry. In Asia, where heavily subsidized pricing and discounting have become a main attraction for users, the trend is already visible in such major acquisitions as e-commerce (Snapdeal’s acquisition of FreeCharge) and food delivery (Foodpanda’s acquisition of Just Eat India). This consolidation of industries can result in higher quality of apps and a healthier ecosystem.

5. Improving productivity app downloads

iPad productivity downloads still remain at the year 2010 level. The number is expected to increase in 2016. One of the possible opportunities to achieve this is Microsoft future improvement of Office suite and mobile-first productivity apps like Office Sway.

6. New trends for financial services

Finance apps have been showing a stable growth on the iOS platform and finance downloads are ahead of all iOS downloads for the past two years but fintech apps are only starting to be deployed. Amid an increasing usage of apps for remittance, asset management, fintech apps are expected to grow on both iOS and Google Play platforms.

7. New revenues for TvOS

Allowing third-party apps with gaming and video streaming, AppleTV is going to gain a leading position in 2016. That can possibly create a lager gamer population and user engagement, as well as foster competition among developers. Moreover, TvOS is likely to increase income using smartphones or tablets as a second-screen.

8. Youtube red: attracting more viewers

The market of over-the-top (OTT) is expected to be broadened by YouTube Red. YouTube Red is going to make original series together with YouTube celebrities, which is supposed to attract more young viewers, who may be familiar with them.

9. Discovering new usage methods for smartwatches

Mainly used as smartphones, smartwatches represent a challenging sphere for developers and are not likely to have innovations. The way smartwatches are used is supposed to be changed to cover vertical-specific contexts and enterprise spheres. Nevertheless, smartwatches can become particular useful for fitness and health monitoring.

10. Increasing interest in Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)

Supported by major platforms like Google, Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) is expected to increase users awareness and engagement in AR. Future releases of Facebook’s Oculus Rift, Samsung’s Gear VR and Microsoft’s HoloLens will give us a first insight of AR/VR platforms.

From QA perspective, the increasing popularity of the above described apps is likely to foster competition among other apps. Conducting a deep investigation of important features and being aware of the new trends, quality assurance can become an essential step in helping any application meet the highest quality standards.

This article is prepared on the basis of the report “Top App Predictions of 2016”.

In the modern mobile world all organizations are beginning to build their own enterprise mobile applications, which makes them turn to specialized mobile application testing services to respond to new challenges and market requirements. To analyze how today’s enterprise trends shape this process, it is useful to consider two surveys conducted by trustworthy organizations: Apperian mobile application management company and Cisco networking company.

According to the Cisco forecast, the amount of mobile-connected devices will increase significantly and there will be 11.5 billion devices by 2019. Last year the number of mobile-connected devices exceeded the world’s overall population. Companies are doing their best to roll out applications, and make them as easy as possible to use.

Apperian research demonstrates that 60% of companies are developing their own mobile apps to support and speed up main business processes. 67% of respondents consider improved business processes as a goal for mobility.

Top challenges

The respondents were asked to name the top challenges to achieving their mobility goals. The results were as follows:

  • Security concerns (67 % )
  • Determining ROI (32 %)
  • A lack of funds (29 %)
  • Reaching Bring your own device (BYOD) policy, contracted or unmanaged devices (26%)
  • A lack of management tools (23%)

Security

Security tops the list of the challenges that organizations face when they develop their applications. This is due to the constant evolution of mobile security threats. All mobility programs must ensure that they appropriately respond to the security risks.

The Apperian Research shows that less than 25% of respondents can see when the information is lost. That means that some 75% can’t detect the events that can lead to corporate data leaks if the right controls are not in place.

Visibility and investments

Any enterprise mobility program need to be thoroughly analyzed in order to be successful. According to the Cisco forecast more than 50% of all organizations have no idea whether their apps are used. 48% do understand who is using their applications and 42% can see how frequently apps are run.

All surveyed organizations need greater visibility into statistics about their app usage.

Participants stated the list of investments they are making to increase the adoption:

  • More applications for core business processes (47%)
  • User interface/experience improvements (43%)
  • Training (35%)
  • Analytics (35%)
  • Agile development with user input (33%)

Recommendations

The Apperian provides the organizations seeking a competitive advantage with a number of recommendations.

  • During the development of the application, focus first on main business processes
  • The best option is to support business processes with internally developed apps
  • Invest money in technology to manage the applications
  • Think of your users as clients
  • Invest in analytics

To take advantage of the continuing mobile revolution you need to analyze the needs of your customers. Moreover, it is vital to keep abreast of the current situation on the market of mobile applications. If you follow all the recommendations, you are likely to have remarkable success in the industry of mobile application development.

The seventh edition of the World Quality Report, the only global report for application quality, was published this autumn. 1,560 respondents from 32 countries participated in the research. What are the latest QA and testing tendencies? Are there any changes in them?

a1qa has analyzed the recent IT trends and would like to present the five most interesting and relevant research items that are confirmed by our experience.

1. Main areas in mobile testing

Mobile testing remains important in all spheres of business alongside with the increasing number of mobile devices. It is remarkable that there is a shift of attention from traditional testing (functional and compatibility) to security testing (55%).

Security testing is followed by performance, ease of use, and compatibility testing. Functionality testing still remains vital but its prioritization is in decline (48% compared to 54% in 2014).

This situation is quite logical, as appropriate security is strategically essential while other types of testing are significant in the application performance. The number of the challenge areas is declining, because organizations are becoming more mature and experienced in mobile testing.

2. Common security testing activities

As it can be seen from the previous point, we observe that the main attention is payed to security. There is a set of testing activities that are commonly performed. They include:

  • Dynamic application security testing, performed by running test cases to expose the application vulnerabilities (57%).
  • Static application security testing, performed using scanning tools to check code by development teams (52%).
  • Manual code checking, carried out to find out whether anything can produce vulnerabilities using the physical line-by-line code review (52%).
  • Penetration testing (39%), aimed at trying and demonstrating infrastructure vulnerabilities.

For maximum benefit organizations need to combine the use of automated checks with manual testing.

3. The increase in test cases automation

Every year the number of automated test cases within the organization is rising. The level of test automation is considered to be one of the key indicators of a testing company’s efficiency. It’s a common belief that in a few years all testing will be automated.

A great variety of test automation tools (both licensed and open source) is currently available in the market. Test automation has evolved dramatically and now embraces the integrated automation of QA aspects across the lifecycle. However, manual testing is still prevailing (55%). Thus, automated testing has a considerable way to go. In the mature testing environment some 70-80% should be automated.

4. Test automation challenges

The adoption of automated test cases is slowed down by a number of challenges:

  • Functionality changes very often.
  • Test automation is not supported by delivery methodology.
  • There is an absence of appropriate automation tools.
  • Organizations don’t have the required automation testing process/methods.
  • There are not enough skilled and experienced test automation resources.

Despite the above-mentioned challenges organizations have achieved a considerable increase in the level of automation. In future automation won’t be considered as the secondary activity behind manual testing.

5. Test data management

Test data management (TMD) is still a relevant problem for a large number of organizations. The adoption of agile, DevOps and cloud initiatives makes the test data creation and maintenance complex. It becomes difficult to synchronize the testing, control and maintain the data in different versions of environment under test.

Managing test data is a growing concern. Some companies are introducing a new role of the Testing Data Manger. It means that TMD starts to get the attention it deserves. The creation of complex test data sets for end-to-end workflows is expected to become easier in future. It is confirmed by the fact that the reducing trend in test data challenges from 2013 has continued in 2015.

Comparing with the 2014 research findings, this year we witness the shift to security testing and rapid development of automated testing. Will these trends remain relevant in 2016?

Mobile applications become more popular day by day. Over the last year the usage of mobile apps reached 115%. According to the research people use mostly messengers, social network applications and photo/video sharing applications.

We analyzed applications made for iOS and Android mobile platforms and get curios results:

  • Google Play took the lead over the Appstore in downloads

THOUGH

  • The revenue of Android developers twice less than iOS developers

Where mobile OS should be targeted in the near future?

Specialists say that the countries like Russia, China, Brazil and India will increase the revenues this year. Such a statement bases upon the growth of downloads in these countries, the number has reached 1.8 points now, which defines he direction in some way.

What OS users expect?

It won`t be a great surprise but what users want is GAMES, besides it`s the most profitable OS. Mobile games have three times exceeded the gaming console income. If compared with other applications, users spend time for games more than on all others.

Successful sales criteria

Analyzing the application sales rate, I can say that the most popular applications are those that use Freemium monetization system. This service model allows using basic application features free and then you can expand the features list by purchasing a Premium account.

Multimedia

Photo and video sharing applications take the next point in popularity list, especially if they are integrated with the social networks, like Facebook and messengers. And due to the revenue increase from music sales, music applications also rapidly gain the popularity.

Financial instruments

Moreover, people today more often prefer mobile payments making mobile banking applications of high demand.

QA

As long as popularity of mobile applications increases every day the cost of failure is high, that’s why mobile app testing services are in that high demand today.

The first stage of testing process – requirements testing – is often of great demand. What makes this step so essential?

Requirements` testing begins before the development process. On this very stage testers analyze the navigation scheme, screen layout and customer requirements. In most cases QA engineers can detect most of the contradictions and requirements incompleteness on this step. Among those can be absence of secondary screen layout, presence of non-used buttons. As long as all malfunctions are removed QA engineers start writing test scenarios, while the requirements directed to the developers team. Due to the requirements testing process the customer can decrease delay time during the application development process.

When Android applications are tested, engineers often apply monkey-tests. The application should respond correctly to accidental or unexpected occasions. Extremely often mobile devices get useless information (for example, when the buttons get tapped on the unblocked devices), thus the device should correctly process the information.

Still, this is only the analysis the time shows what will really happen.

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