Automation Testing Trends for 2020

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Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast. We're all getting together to learn more about software testing and automation with your host, Joe Colantonio.

Hey it's Joe and Welcome to the first ever episode of 2020 for the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Today it's just you and me again and I apologize, I usually don't like doing back to back podcasts of just me talking. I actually celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary and so my wife decided she wanted to take a Caribbean cruise to celebrate even though I don't like going outside and I'm not a big fan of the sun. But they that's besides the point and I'm on a boat as you're listening to this recording. So I'm away for a few weeks so I needed some content to release while I was away and unfortunately because of the holidays I didn't have any other interviews recorded in advance to plan to run during the time I was away. So I had to record these ahead of time before I left. So I had some good content to share with you. Unfortunately it's just you and me, but the good thing is I think it's excellent content and today we're going to cover the top automation skills and trends you need to know in 2020. I've been doing this pretty much since 2014. About my top picks for the new year since 2014. So this is this is like the sixth annual Joe Test Trends report, I guess what you could call it. But anyway, hope you enjoy it and hope you have an awesome prosperous 2020. Also, if there's any topic or speaker you'd like to hear more about in 2020, let me know. I'm always looking for suggestions on how to make the show even better. You could drop me a line@joetestguild.com and another thing you can do to help yourself with your automation efforts, it's 2020 is to register for the Automation Guild. Automation Guild is the largest online conference in the world, dedicated 100% to helping you succeed with creating full stack end to end automation awesomeness. We have a bunch of sessions available that are going to help you either learn a tip, tool technique or best practice that's going to accelerate either a new automation project or an existing automation project and get your whole team on board to really focus in on end flaky test in the new decade. So definitely check that out. Head on over to automationguild.com register today. The test Guild Automation Podcast is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Sauce Labs, their cloud based test platform helps ensure your favorite mobile apps and websites work flawlessly on every browser, operating system and device. Get a free trial. Visit testguild.com sourcelabs and click on the Exclusive Sponsor section to try it for free for 14 days. Check it out.

I just put this together. I'll probably refine it over the next few weeks while I'm on the boat and probably create a blog post that's probably a little more coherent, but I think I have the bones of it that I can share so the first trend I heard most about in 2019 that I think is going to be a big trend in 2020 is security testing. Now, all the topics and testing that I heard about on the Test Guild Automation Podcast security is one of the most reoccurring topics I heard over and over again on most of my Test Guild podcast episodes or based on a recent article in SD Times Security is at an all time low point because in 2019 we saw the second, third and seventh biggest breaches of all time being measured by the number of people that were affected. And I've been hearing more and more since I've been starting my security podcast that's becoming more critical to be aware of this because it's starting to affect open source, and open source is the bulk of what a lot of people are using to actually build their applications nowadays. So I feel we're getting to a break point here that if you're not dealing with security yet, you're going to so your team needs to be involved in security testing. In 2020, you're going to be dealing with security for sure. And so I actually hosted a online conference for a company called Vivint Worldwide that's basically a user group for Micro Focus. And this topic also came up on the Functional Testing conference that we ran for them. And so here's just a quick excerpt of some experts speaking about what they see themselves with security testing, especially as we head into 2020. So here's a conversation I had with Rick Sullivan, who is the VP and GM of Application Services for DXC Technology, and Steven Dimitrov, who's a Director of Application Solutions at Moretto Solutions.

The other area that I would mention in addition to that is security. There's a heavy focus on security, and today's security isn't what it had been from decades ago. Security, I believe today, is heavily about the applications layer, and it is very much so akin to testing. It has to do with understanding vulnerabilities that can be introduced as we're trying to deliver on faster and faster cycles of software with quality. And so a heavy focus around application security, data security and security across that lifecycle with agile methods and agile experiences, I think are two areas that we heavily focus on. And then through very hands on, practical work experiences. Steven, I'm sure you've got a strong perspective on this as well.

Yeah, absolutely. And if you look at my organization, we're a relatively small organization that focuses once again on testing. I would say about 60% of our business is on the traditional testing of applications and the remaining 40% is on security testing for those applications. If you looked at those numbers just one or two years ago, it would have been more skewed towards an 8020 type percentage. So we're seeing a lot of that. But yeah, absolutely, it's something that all of our customers need. Everybody knows about it. It's a much more popular dialogue these days than traditional application testing. However, we're still working very hard with our customers to make sure that they view that as something that should be integrated across that lifecycle.

Steven, I think that's really. There's a key word that you just mentioned about integrated right across that life cycle because historically, historically it's usually been a particular gate or it's been a checkpoint. I come from, I spent half my career in the public sector, space security and highly regulated industries has been critical for years. Having that integrated across the software development life cycle we found is key and doing as much of a shift left approach to try and address security earlier in the life cycle, even as early in the requirements in the architecture.

So as Rick just mentioned, I definitely agree there as well as a trend, we're going to see the integration of different disciplines across the lifecycle. So it's not just silos. So back in the day we had silos for security, we had a silo for performance testing. DevOps I think is breaking down all these walls and taking all these specialties as well and throwing them onto the Sprint teams. So definitely security is shifting left 20, 20 definitely also performance testing. So two trends there. We're doing.

The rise of security testing within the Agile teams and Sprint teams and also performance testing as more and more of these shift left and we get more of these type of disciplines integrated across the software development life cycle.

And I feel so strongly about this. I actually created a separate podcast that just dedicated to security testing and to performance testing. I believe they're all part of testing in general, but I just felt like to get more content out there, I create these other podcasts on these other areas I think have been neglected. So definitely check that out. Head on over to testguild.com, click on the podcast and you'll see one for automation, performance and security, and who knows what else I might come up with in 2020.

All right, so the next trend is the acceptance of AI automation. And what I mean by that is, you know, I talked about this in the last episode. I would go to a conference, say in 2016, 17, 18, even early 2019. Whenever you said AI automation, people would roll their eyes. But if you were following the money and a lot of these startups that were coming out around that time were getting funded. And anytime a company's getting funded, it usually means that someone's backing their vision for the Future. I think 2020 is going to be the year we see acceptance of some of these AI tools as helping testers, not replacing testers. But it's definitely going to be more and more common to see solutions out there. I had a bunch of people I spoke with in 2019 coming out with solutions that have AI machine learning built into them, as well as some open source tools that are now coming up that have these features as well as. So if you didn't hear last week's episode, just check that out. I go over this a little in more detail. So AI machine learning will be more accepted in 2020 and I think we'll see more innovation in this area as well. So if AI is going to gain acceptance, one language I often see associated with AI machine learning is Python. So I definitely think Python as well is going to get a bump in 2020. I love Python, I'm a hack with it, but that's the beauty of it. It's almost like duct tape where you could do almost anything with it and it's so easy to use that you could do almost anything with it without having hardcore developer skills with it. So what I think that's great about that, the good and bad with that is you can create some, create some awesome helper tools. And for helper tools, they don't need to be developer grade solutions. Anything you could do to help yourself automate a process, I would do it. And if Python can help you and also help you get your foot in the job with learning more about AI machine learning, since it's kind of the language underneath the covers, you definitely should check that out and learn more of it. If you didn't know, Google itself makes heavy use of TensorFlow, which is a Python library. So I thought it follows that Python will be a skill that will be more demand in 2020. And once again, because I believe in this so much, at Automation Guild 2020, we're going to have two, two sessions on helping you getting up to speed with Python. The first one is by Andrew Knight and he's going to go over how to get started with Python and also has an example on how to test a REST service. So if you have no experience with Python whatsoever and you believe that's also going to be a trend going up in 2020, you definitely want to join the Automation Guild. Head on over to automation guild.com register today if you haven't already. The other session is by Josh Grant at Source Labs. Source Labs is a huge company that deals with a lot of different folks, so if Josh is also backing Python, then I'm saying, well, I'm thinking that it's probably a trend they're seeing on their end as well. And he's going to go over PI Test, the awesome parts, which is also a great startup. So Andrew, probably a great beginner course. And then Josh will take you that extra step to learn a little more about PI Test. I think these two sessions together at Automation Guild is going to be a great way to start your 2020, so definitely check that out. And also make sure to check out the show notes. I'll have a link to what was actually one of my most popular blog posts in 2019, which was best Python tools for full stack Automation testing. All right, next trend I definitely see, and I've been saying this, okay, I'll admit since 2014. I actually wrote a book in 2014 using UFTs web testing functionality, which I thought was going to explode and never did. But I believe 2020 is going to be the year that API testing, if you don't know it, you need to know API testing. And I've spoken to a few people in 2019 that have actually validated my belief that 2020 is when API testing is going to become even more critical. For real, if you don't do it yet, you need to learn API testing. For example, I was talking to Paul Grossman. Paul Grossman is the Dark Arts wizard. Definitely check him out on Twitter. But unfortunately, Paul was unemployed for a short period of time and it was taking him a while to get another gig. And I was going, what's going on? How are you not being hired? And he said, oh, the reason I'm not working yet is lack of API experience on my resume. And then he said, yep, GUI is old school microservices is in demand. So, you know, anytime someone has been recently unemployed, so anytime I speak to anyone that's been going on interviews, I always ask, hey, what are they asking you? And Paul says everyone, everyone he talked to and he talked to a lot of people brought up API testing. So don't be stuck if you're looking to stay employable in 2020. And you never know when you're going to get laid off. Hey, I got laid off into last year. I never thought I'd ever get laid off. But hey, companies, you never know what direction they're going in. You don't want to be caught off guard. You want to be able to make sure that if you're laid off, you know, you definitely want to have the skills to be able to get employed quickly. I believe API Test is one of them. I also spoke to the CEO of API Fortress and asked his views on API testing trends and this is what he told me. So Patrick, I know you've been going to a lot of conferences as a vendor. Just curious to know what your pulse is on the industry. Are more and more folks using API testing for performance testing or are they still even neglecting it in the functional testing part of their test strategy?

I would say in the last year, which is why API Fortress sponsored close to 20 conferences this year it's really changed in that API testing has become a much.

Larger conversation in the testing community. It's, you know, everything is build first, test later. APIs were been around forever but really the inflection point happened about two years ago. And so, you know, early last year, Pete, we'd be talking to people, they wouldn't even be know, wouldn't really know what an API is. They wouldn't be testing anything. Like, you know, smartberry has some pretty interesting white papers out about the statistics of how many large, medium and small organizations that don't have a formal API testing process. And in the last year that's really sort of exploded. Like we do presentations sometimes on how to go from manual API testing to automated API testing. And it's, you know, two years ago when we were doing these presentations it would just be 10 people and now it's standing room only because it's a thing now. Like now that we've sort of had so many solutions and been so matured in terms of UI testing and mobile app testing, it's time for that next phase which is the actual foundation of those things.

Awesome. Thank you Patrick for that. And once again, what I do is I survey my what I do is I survey past folks that attended Automation Guild and ask them what the number one thing that they're struggling with and API testing came up as well. So that's why I'm calling this a trend in 2020. And also if you attend Automation Guild 2020, head on over to automationguild.com and register if you haven't already. We're going to have three sessions around API testing. The first one is with John Ferguson Smart who goes over testing Graph SQL services with Serenity. We also have contract testing beyond functional API test and another session on looking inside the box for better UI test to make your tests faster, quicker, more reliable, utilizing other things other than GUI tests like API test. So three different sessions kind of around API testing. So if you want to become more familiar with API testing as well, this is a good time to get on board in the new year. Another thing I do every year is I like to go to job boards and just type in keywords to see the frequency that they turn up in post around my area for job opening. So if I ever was laid off like I was, I'm working on skills that I'm prepared for eventual layoff or let go at a job that I have skills that are in demand. So one thing I checked into last year was blockchain testing and just today I just did a search for blockchain testing around kind of my area and I was surprised by the number of companies that actually have blockchain listed as a skill that they'd like for testers. For example, when I typed in blockchain for my area blockchain in Indeed.com, i got examples like this quizitive is empowered the enterprise to harness the Microsoft cloud and emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence, machine learning and into the Internet of things like never before. We're looking for a tester that's able to grow into this position. Another company has one. Our company is growing and our digital health portfolio continues to expand with solutions ranging from back office to blockchain. They were looking for a software quality assurance engineer, so a bunch of different positions. Another one actually was looking for this is the title blockchain test engineer. So seeing more of this as a trend and we're actually going to have a session on this at Automation Guild with Rianne Lewis on getting started with blockchain testing because I believe it's going to be a bigger trend in 2020 and beyond. All right, so speaking of buzzwords, another buzzword that's been around for a little bit, but I think it's actually picking up momentum and I think this is a great time to get your foot in the door with this is RPA or Robotic Process Automation. So robotic. So I was speaking with Jim Hazen and he opened my eyes to this as a particular area that I might want to focus in on 2020 since I am laid off. Something I'd like to add to my toolkit as just another skill that'll make me more employable. If I so decide to forget about test skill this whole time and actually work for the man again, this might be something I would focus my energy on. I think it's a real thing. I think there's money behind it and I think this is a great time to get involved with rpa. Here's Jim explaining what is rpa. If you don't know what RPA testing.

Is, what it is is instead of test automation, we're running all these different data scenarios and things like that. You're automating a work task. So say like you have an insurance claim system and it's a workflow engine. So what it'll do is it'll drive either the part of the process or the whole process. So say someone submits a claim via email, there's an email box, I send it to the system, picks it up and it's in a formatted layout. So the tool will go scan that and say, okay, here's the information I need in order to put it in the system. And it'll do that. So you automate that part of it, you remove the human potential for human error and then.

As it goes through the workflow, you can drive different parts of those processes. So that's what the tools are doing.

So if you are already into automation, I think this is a great, a great skill to have because I think want to see more of this and I like to find emerging areas that people where it doesn't have as many people in it because right now automation, everyone knows Selenium, right? Everyone you talk to Selenium, blah, blah, blah, right? All these blogs. And so it's really that the price of a consultant that just knows Selenium has gone down. So if you're looking to increase the value of, if you're consulting or the value of what you bring to a company where it's not just oh yeah, I know Selenium. Like everyone else, I think RPA is something you should keep an eye on. It's something I'm definitely going to keep an eye on. Jim actually told me that UiPath has a certificate that's currently available, that's free, that they're going to start charging for in a few months. So I'm going to take this training and, and just learn a little bit more about it myself. I think it's a great area to be involved in if you're already familiar with automation in general. Okay, the next prediction. Now it's funny how things go back and forth. So what I mean by that is back in the day your choice was vendor based tools, right? And then came open source tools. So anyone that was using vendor based, most of them merged over to open source. But then when I started seeing was vendors coming up with solutions to act like wrappers on top of Selenium. But now what I'm seeing even more of is open source solutions acting like wrappers on top of Selenium and Appium. So a lot of solutions like Serenity bdd, that's been around for a little bit, adds extra features and functionality that you don't get just starting from scratch with the Selenium API or the Appium API. So I talked to a lot of folks this year with solutions that I spoke to a lot of folks in 2019 with solutions that act like wrappers on top of Selenium and Appium that gives you all this extra functionality that you don't need to create yourself. So definitely see a rise in these tools. Things like Test Project IO is becoming more popular. I think it'll be more popular in 2020. The reason being is you don't need to start from scratch. You can go to a solution that makes it very easy to get up and running and utilize existing code functionality that you just drag and drop into your script and and get what you need without having to create it yourself. So definitely the rise of these wrappers. Also Webdriver IO is becoming more popular that I've been hearing more about and that's almost like a wrapper on top of Selenium where you don't have to worry about weights. It handles the weights for you automatically does other things as well that you don't get right out of the box creating your own Selenium framework. So I think you want to see more and more of these frameworks coming out that utilize the best practice of Selenium and Appium, but have extra functionality that adds all the things you need to actually get a framework without having to code it themselves. You definitely see the rise of this as well as probably more codeless type recording and playback solutions that actually get pretty close to fulfilling the dream of codeless automation, even though you probably still have to modify them. I think we'll see more of these wrappers coming out. That just makes it easier for folks to get into automation without having to get into the guts of the Selenium and Appium APIs. Another quick trend if we're talking about API machine learning, then definitely we should see the rise in needing skills around big data Testing Big Data, definitely. When I do a search in Indeed.com, i'm seeing more companies looking for folks that have skills with testing big data. So once again I went to indeed.com typed in big Data and I saw some interesting things. I've actually saw a title called Big Data Test Lead and the primary skills I was looking for was strong Big data testing experience.

Or experience with ETL QA and Big Data QA using Big Data QA tools like Query Surge and other potential ETL tools. So but this also wraps in nicely with Python as well, because Python is considered one of the best data science tools for big data jobs. So if you need to deal with big data at all and you want to do integration between say data analysis and web apps or statistical code with the production database, the Python language is going to help you there as well. So two trends together. I definitely see them growing in 2020. Now next trend is something I said we're going to see more of 2019. We definitely saw more of it in 2019. And that is the rise of smart execution. And by smart execution I mean you check your developer checks in code and you know that you know these five tests will cover that specific check in. So rather than running all your tests against all the things, which is why a lot of people recommend, I think want to see the trend to running less tests and that will add and I think that's essential because it's going to save you time, money, resources because you have a smaller test set that's more targeted towards exactly what was checked in. So if your tests fail, you know there's a direct correlation between that check in and and those tests. So it's really going to help you speed things up as well. So definitely a big, big trend in what I'm seeing in smart execution. I've seen numerous tools come out around this area. Like C Lights has an excellent solution to help you do this. We have tools like powersoft that just came out with Selenic that has an option for smart execution. Spoke to folks at App Sureify has something that helps you with smart test execution. I think it's something we see even more of in 2020. And so the last prediction for 2020 is. I like this word. Jonathan Wright told me about it. AIOps. So expanding AI out of just functional testing and applying it to shift right activities. So it's monitoring things in production and it's able to take that monitoring, able to take that monitoring information and automatically create a model for you of what's actually happened in production that you could then base your functional test on. You have a functional performance test on and really using information all the way through your software development life cycle from the beginning to the end. Powered by AI type machine learning technology. Definitely see that as a big trend in 2020. So AI moving beyond. Not only is it getting accepted into functional testing, I think it's going to move beyond. I think this is also going with a trend that I called last year called continuous testing. So anything to do with continuous testing, DevOps CICD. I think AI is going to be more and more involved and also it's going to move beyond functional testing to security testing, performance testing, all these other areas. So good time to get on board. Here's just a quick sample of Jonathan, right, explaining AIOps from his point of view.

We all know AI is kind of the buzzword at the moment and this is why I was kind of saying, yes, AIOps is your flagship APM tools on steroids like the one I'm looking at at the moment. You know, your Dynatrace having AI built into it. I'm looking at New Relic 1 at the moment and I've literally got a distributed tracing for complex systems. I've got my Kube Cluster Explorer, I've got my AWS integration with it and I can see from a single view, I can do analytics and work out where the issues are, where should I invest my time. I can create synthetic tests to cover that off to keep an eye on those things. I can do predictions based on historical information. That's great. But at the end of the day, we need to start off with let's build better, more realistic performance tests using these other digital experience analytics tools. You can look at where your users are using the application, how the conversions are getting blocked, at what point in the pipeline. This is where you've got to work with the functional guys, the automation guys, to make sure they're creating scenarios that try those different combinations and you can then leverage what they've done as far as the models they've created, the automation that they've created, the Selenium scripts that they've created and you can convert Selenium. You can use something like Taurus. You can literally throw Selenium scripts at it. You can use Taurus. It's an open source platform built on JMeter and it will convert anything to anything. I can give it a Selenium script for my functional guys and it will generate a JMETER script out of the other side without me writing a single code. And I can run all their functional tests to create my non functional tests. I think this is where we need to harmonize together. We need to work together with the functional guys and build better tests.

So those are my top trends for testing and automation in 2020. And as Jonathan mentioned, let's focus in on creating awesome test in 2020 and become better Full Stack End to End Automation Engineers for links to everything of value we covered in this episode, make sure to head on over to testguild.com a LakeAutomation280 and while you're there, make sure to click on the Try it for free Today link under the Exclusive Sponsor section to learn all about Sauce Labs awesome products and services. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full Stack Automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good keep. Cheers.

Thanks for listening to the Test Guild Automation Podcast. Head on over to testguild. Com for full show notes, amazing blog articles and online testing conferences. Make sure to subscribe to join the Guild and continue your testing journey. This has been a Joe Calantonio production.