Top Software Testing Trends To Follow In 2024

No two days are the same for those in the software testing industry. It’s an ever-changing landscape with new processes, ideas and opportunities appearing every day. When testers stay ahead of the game, they have an opportunity to learn and develop themselves – but also find efficiencies and improvements in their work too.

With the software testing landscape changing regularly, it can be hard to know which new ideas to follow and adopt. To help navigate this, we’re sharing the top software testing trends for 2024 so you can get ahead for the year to come.

Shift-Left and Shift-Right Testing

With quality being at the forefront for software as we move to 2024, there is a growing rise of shift-left and shift-right testing to help provide the quality assurance that software needs.

Shift-left testing is a software testing approach that involves testing the software products as early as possible in the development cycle, preferably in the design or requirement phase. Shift-left testing helps software testers identify and prevent defects before they become costly and difficult to fix.

Also, shift-left testing helps software testers collaborate more closely with developers, business analysts, and customers and ensure that the software products meet the expectations and needs of the end-users.

On the other hand, shift-right testing is a software testing approach that involves testing the software products after they are deployed in the production environment. Shift-right testing helps software testers monitor and evaluate the performance, reliability, usability, and security of the software products in real-world scenarios.

This type of testing also helps software testers collect feedback from the end-users, identify issues not detected in the pre-production stages, and implement continuous improvement.

DevOps, Agile, and Continuous Testing

We know software testing is a field that requires speed, and that is why DevOps continues to grow in popularity. DevOps is a software development methodology that aims to shorten the development cycle and deliver software products faster and more frequently.

Combined with Agile, DevOps and Agile create a cycle of ‘quality of speed’, helping to not only develop software faster but increase the quality of software with the practices, rules and processes that DevOps creates.

Going into 2024, there will be a growing trend looking towards DevOps and Agile and a vital component of this – continuous testing. Continuous testing is a critical area of DevOps, as it ensures that the software products are tested continuously throughout the development process, from planning to deployment.

With continuous testing, it enables software testers to detect and fix bugs early, reduce risks, improve quality, and increase customer satisfaction. In an Agile space, continuous testing can help to refine software using the iteration process in the Agile project format. With speed being of the essence for software, as we move into 2024, this link between continuous testing, DevOps and Agile becomes a strong trend. See how to transform your software testing into Agile Projects with our UKITB course.  

(More) Test Automation

While test automation is not a new trend in software testing, it is becoming more important and prevalent. With the rise of AI and machine learning and continued growth in 2024, test automation can reduce human intervention by using software tools or scripts to perform testing tasks.

Research from a 2021-2022 report found that most firms only use automated testing at 20% of current capacity. While this has undoubtedly grown in 2023, there is still a clear intention to develop this in 2024. So much so that a third of companies are looking to automate between half and three-quarters of their testing process, and around 20% of organisations want to automate more than 75% of their test process.

One of the main benefits of test automation is that it can help to loosen the bottleneck of software testing. It can help software testers save time, effort, and resources, increase test coverage, improve test accuracy, enhance test consistency, and accelerate test delivery.

Furthermore, as time goes on, test automation can support tests with the increasing complexity and diversity of software products, such as web applications, mobile applications, cloud applications, microservices and IoT devices.

Whilst we can expect test automation to be a dominant trend in 2024, there are still challenges ahead. Test automation still requires careful planning, design, implementation, maintenance, and evaluation. Furthermore, automation doesn’t eliminate the need for manual testing either. However, as we look to 2024, we can expect more advanced automation tools and methods to support software testers better. If you’re looking for support in getting to grips with the growing trend of test automation, TSG Training offers specific automation training.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are not new concepts in software testing, but they are becoming more advanced and widely used and will continue to be a trend in 2024. AI and ML can help software testers automate tedious and repetitive tasks, such as test case generation, test execution, test data creation, bug detection, and bug reporting.

AI and ML can also help software testers perform more complex and intelligent tasks, such as test optimisation, test prioritisation, test coverage analysis, test maintenance, and test prediction. AI and ML can also enable software testers to perform testing in new domains, such as natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition, and self-driving cars.

User Experience Testing

Another trend set to continue in 2024 is user experience (UX) testing. This is a type of software testing that focuses on how the end-users interact with the software products. UX testing aims to evaluate the usability, accessibility, functionality, aesthetics, emotions, satisfaction, and loyalty of the end-users. This can help software testers ensure that the software products provide a positive and engaging user experience that meets or exceeds the expectations of the end-users.

UX testing can involve various methods and techniques depending on the context and objectives of the test. Some examples of UX testing methods are user interviews, surveys, feedback, personas, journeys, mockups, heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs, A/B testing, eye tracking and heat maps.

So, as we look towards 2024, we can expect to see trends that work to speed up the testing processes while simultaneously assuring quality. With this in mind, we’ll see trends like the above, as well as integrated tools that can combine processes for efficiency in a vast range of testing environments to ensure quality across a range of settings to better improve the testing process.