Automation Testing Trends for 2021

Welcome to the Test Guild Automation Podcast where we all get together to learn more about automation and software testing with your host, Joe Calantonio.

Hey, it's Joe. And welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast, the first episode for 2021. And if you've been following me for any amount of time, you know that every year in the new year, I like to start off with a article around automation trends for the new year. I've been doing it for six years now. I actually haven't written the article yet, so I've been kind of kicking around these ideas in my head. I'm gonna try to put them to words in this podcast. So I'll be hashing out different ideas I have and eventually I'll make an article on it based on the feedback I get from this episode. So here are my top eight trends you need to know as an automation Engineer Going into 2021, I believe it's going to be an awesome new year. Thank God 2020 is behind us and let's do some automation awesomeness going forward. You don't want to miss this episode. Check it out and if you haven't already, if you really want to kick off your automation efforts right in 2021, you definitely want to register for the largest online conference in the world dedicated 100% to helping you succeed with automation testing. Head on over to automationguild.com and register today. Our goal at every Guild conference is you learn the actionable tip, tool, technique or best practice that's going to help accelerate your automation efforts in the new year. Register today. Head on over to automationguild.com.

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All right, so as we all know, 2020 was crazy with COVID 19 impacting all our lives. And because of the pandemic, more and more companies have had to go 100% digital. And I think this has many ramifications. It's for one has only accelerated a company's need to go through digital transformations which require companies to port most things over to apps and software as the only way they actually were able to interact with their customers in 2020. So COVID 19 thing has changed everything. It's made everyone almost a cloud first platform and and because of this, I think there are many things that impact automation. So for one, because more and more companies are developing more and more software now, rather than even retail companies, a lot of them had to go digital because they had to get orders from the customers online. I think this in turn has really increased the amount of testing that needs to be done now because we have more and more software that's living out in the world. And I don't think even with the vaccine this is going to change. And with more and more companies moving towards these digital transformations, it really is becoming harder and harder to maintain quality when companies need to cover on average. This is based on a Appli Tools survey. 300,000 pages and screens daily for a typical app. So just think for large organizations that have more than one app, all the type of pages that they need to validate before they're able to deliver their software to customers. And, and I think that's a really eye opening statistic. And so I really think this opens up the need for even more Automation in 2021. And we're going to go into what that actually means for Trends going into 2021. So the first trend is the need for more automation in 2021. So that's my first trend. If you haven't done any automation, if you're a skeptical automation, you're still going into fights on oh, is automation really testing? You know, what is the concept of testing? And just sitting around talking about this, that's fine, you know, that's great. But in order to make it in this world with cicd, you need automation tools to help you at some point in your software development pipeline. I'm not saying automation replaces every type of testing activity, but I do think if you just been ignoring it completely, thinking, you know, like testing cannot be automated, you're on this high horse about what testing is. Just remember people thought chess couldn't be automated, people thought driving vehicles couldn't be automated. All these things have been shown can be automated. And like I said, I don't think testers and testing will be replaced by automation. I think it's testers need to understand what is automation, where they can benefit from it and where they can't and then focus their energies on the places where it can't with different types of testing activities. But for the places where it does fit in, where it is going to help them accelerate their, their software development life cycle, then absolutely invest in some sort of automation tools to help you in that area. So I think automation, testing, automation in general is just going to be even more and more important in 2021. So definitely get on board now if you haven't already. And my second trend I think focuses more on this move to cloud. Actually, before we get into cloud, I guess my second trend is accessibility testing. Now, as more and more companies go online, I think in order to adapt to the needs of all their customers, they need to make sure that their applications are accessible. For people with vision issues. From a vision, from a visual perspective, from a hearing perspective, all these types of accessibility areas definitely need to be tested and improved on in order to make your software really useful to all your customers. And so that's only going to help you in the long run. So a lot of people have been speaking on my podcast, a lot of them have been bringing up accessibility testing. And I think I hosted around six or seven online events for Applitools in 2020 and I think for every event they had at least one session around accessibility testing. So anytime I see companies focusing on a type of technique that to me is a signal. Anytime I hear thought leaders in the space like Manoj Kumar, who's one of the main contributors to Selenium and a bunch of other open source applications, he did a session on accessibility testing. He's been talking about it for a while. Other folks in the area have been focusing on accessibility testing like Marie Drake, Aparna Gopalakrishna, Crystal Preston Watson. All these awesome testing experts share their knowledge around accessibility testing and their passion for it. So I think accessibility testing in 2021 is going to be essential, critical for you as a tester to get involved with. So definitely hone in on learning more about accessibility testing and how maybe you can start to incorporate that into your software development test plans. Now my third trend is cloud. If you haven't done anything with cloud, if you haven't really learned about cloud, I think this is the year you really want to get, I think, More acquainted with DevOps based Cloud native development, what that means for your organization, how it can help you with automation in software development in general. With the need for more automation, I think it's only going to create trends for more companies needing to use first off, cloud based service providers like a sauce lab to run against all the different devices that customers are now using to interact with their software. Apple Tools came out with a new service called Visual Grid that's able to run against all these different devices really quick. So once again a lot of companies are investing in this area and I think you need to be able to run against many different devices and not just focusing on Chrome for your testing efforts because as more and more customers are only able to interact with your company digitally, they're using all other devices that you probably haven't even been testing because most of your activity has probably been brick and mortar type of features and functionality. Now since it's online, they, there's probably scenarios that are coming up now that are making you more aware of what your customers are actually using and what you're gonna need to test for. So definitely taking a cloud first approach to testing is gonna be a big trend for 2021 along these lines as well is cloud based collaboration. So when we're all in the office and once again I'm thinking even with the vaccine, I don't see a lot of companies rushing towards getting everyone back in the office again. I've been preaching the benefits of remote working for 12 years. I worked remotely for 12 years, 12 or 13 years at my previous company and I loved it and I always raved about it. And you hear all these companies, oh, we could never go online and that's impossible for us. And then magically, right, all of a sudden, COVID 19 hits and you know, like within a week all their employees are working remotely. Yeah, that's incredible. Or all these companies or these, these thought leaders are like, oh, agile. Everyone needs to be in one big room together, kumbaya, you know, face to face in order to create quality software, I think that's been blown out of the water as well. So that's a rant. Maybe I'll edit this out. But.

Anyway, so I won't get to go down that path. But I'm just thinking now that everyone's online, there's going to be more needs for cloud based collaboration tools that companies are probably gonna start investing in. So you know, if you looked at test tools like test project IO, a lot of those tests live online in the cloud. So if you had a remote team, everyone would easily be able to grab the test, run the tests on any machine because everything was based or is based on the cloud and be able to collaborate with one another. I think it's gonna be an upshot on a lot of tools as well that's gonna help with collaboration based on these remote type of scenarios. So that's my third prediction for trends in 2021, a push towards cloud based software development and testing.

And so besides cloud, as more and more companies go towards cloud, there's a lot of platforms in the cloud also that give you AI features. So if your company is using Azure or Google Cloud or IBM Watson. A lot of these tools have baked in AI as well. So I think this is just going to be an extension as well to more AI based software assistance for your software development and testing. If you look at some of these technologies, they have baked into them. So again, more familiar with AI based tools and techniques like AB testing. I think Google Cloud has an option for AB experiments using AI. Cloud based auto deploys AI infrastructure, AI platforms and building blocks. All these types of technologies and terms I think you should become more familiar with because I think more and more companies are going to be leveraging tools like Google Cloud or IBM Watson, things like that. So you want to get more familiar with AI for sure.

And I think with AI it's going to open up a lot of areas where you are going to have a lot of data. So how do you handle this data, especially from a testing perspective, to be able to analyze all the information that's being pumped out with all the AI that's going on. So I know last year I said Python is going to be one of the trends. I definitely think I was right on that. If you go to type go, I think it's pronounced type. If you go to the tiobe.com they have a programmer index that they run for languages every month. And in summer 2020 the third most popular language was Python and it looked like had one of the biggest ratings as well. And it I believe is on its way to becoming for the fourth time in a row the top language on Tiobe's index. So Python is awesome because not only is it an easy language to learn, but it also has a lot of modules built in that you can use. Not built in, but that you can pull in a lot of libraries you could pull in to help you with AI and especially dealing with a lot of data utilizing AI. So as I mentioned, this whole podcast I'm just talking off the cuff, so I may have to tighten this up when I actually write an article. So I might be a little bit all over the place, but AI. I went on the tangent with Python because Python really helps you analyze AI because it has a lot of libraries that can help you with it, but also other languages or other techniques you should definitely look into to help you with AI data is tools like R Spark is a big one as well, Apache Spark. So these types of tools or techniques are something you should definitely have in your toolkit as well as a tester going into 2021 and beyond. And if you notice so far a Lot of these predictions really aren't necessarily automation tool testing specific. And I think the reason why is I think we're going to see a shift now and I don't think companies are going to be looking just for someone that could write a Selenium test, right? Can you write a Selenium test, automate my browser, not enter in a password username, can you write me a script? You know, I think it's going to be more higher level as well, where not only are you going to need to know how to do that, but it's going to be more bigger picture. Can you actually automate my whole software development pipeline? So I think we're going to move from just automation scripting, I do automation scripting or testing to I'm a full end to end automation expert. I can help you automate your pipelines. A lot of these tools and techniques we talked about to this point are usually built into your CICD pipelines. And as an automation engineer I think you're going to have to know how to automate all these other activities. So you need to expand beyond just hey, I know Selenium, you know, no, you need more than that. You're going to be, it's going to be more about automations of pipeline automations to help you a full lifecycle for your software development. So that's another trend is automation pipelines, not automation scripting. You know, once again I look for signals and one of the Signals is Selenium 4 is an Alpha and a lot of the functionality they baked in there go kind of beyond just, you know, automation of a ui. They've now rewrote the Selenium grid. And the Selenium grid can do things like with Kubernetes to spin up containers. So you need to know more than just Selenium. You need to know more about these other tools like Kubernetes, like Docker, like Kuba Flow, which is dedicated to making deployments of machine learning workflows. On Kubernetes simple, they also baked in something called telemetry into the new grid design and this helps you integrate which allows you to use something called OpenTelemetry. What allows you to do is distributed tracing. So if anything goes wrong during a test run using this capability you can hook it to anything that consumes tracing outputs so you can see what's going on in the grid, crack it open and try to figure out why it's happening. So other tools that support open telemetry, like Honeycomb, Datadog and others can consume the Open telemetry stuff that they baked into the grid. So a lot of these names, a lot of these companies may be new to you. I think you're going to need to know more about them, more about your infrastructure, more about more than just automation scripting, but also expand it out to any type of automation activity that can happen in your software development life cycle. So the full end to end automation pipeline is going to be huge in 2021 and beyond. So speaking about OpenTelemetry, this plays into my next trend, which is observability. I've been hearing about observability for at least two years now, more and more about it, and I think Honeycomb's site really explains it pretty well. What is observability, how to use it. And you know, with environments are getting more and more complex today. As we talked about, simply monitoring for known problems doesn't address the growing number of issues that are going to happen to your systems. These new issues are unknown unknowns, meaning that without an observable system, you don't know what is causing the problem. You don't have a standard starting point or graph to find out. Having an observable system means you have the instrumentation you need to understand what's happening in your software. And so observability focuses on development of the application and the rich instrumentation you need, not to pull and monitor it for thresholds or defined health checks. But beyond that, you need to be able to ask any arbitrary question about how is the software working, how does it work? So you can't really predict what information you're going to need to know to answer a question you also can't predict. And the reason for this is as we touched on, as more and more companies go cloud native, when microservice architecture systems, they're going to become more and more complex and possible failures become more abundant and harder to debug. Enter the need for observability. So if you haven't done anything with observability, if you haven't heard about tools like OpenTelemetry or Honeycomb, I think 2021 once again is a great time to learn more about it. I think that's a growing trend as well that you need to get on board with. So as I mentioned also, not only are we dealing with automation scripts, but automating the whole pipeline. I've been talking about automation of API testing for years as a trend and I think this year in 2021 the trend is going to continue, but it's an expand to actually the need of understanding how not only to automate an API, but how to leverage that for monitoring purposes as well. If you follow the news, Source Labs actually acquired I think in pretty recently, like In December of 2020, API Fortress and I've had the folks from API Fortress on my podcast many times. So if you're not familiar with them, it's an API testing and monitoring platform that unifies functional integration and load testing across internal third party and APIs. So test, rest, soap, GraphQL, web services, microservices, automated test as part of your CI pipeline, monitoring internal APIs continuously. So a lot of those type of activities we touched upon and other trends are coming all to our head as well. As we're running in our cloud based providers like Source Labs, they're starting to invest in this as well. As I say, I always look for signals and one signal I see is if a company is investing into a technology or a piece of software, if they're acquiring other companies, they probably know what's going on in the marketplace based on what their customers are asking for. And and it's a key indicator of what then you should be focusing on on. Because as these companies start and roll out these new features, new functionality, you're going to need to know how to use it, know about it, how to speak to your teams about it. So end to end monitoring using APIs I think is going to be a big thing in 2021. Another trend you need to be on top of as well. In my final trend, you've probably been waiting the whole show to say, joe, show me some automation testing tools. I need to know. I actually did a whole YouTube video on this, which I'll have in the show notes. I'll probably do another episode just on the top. I think it was the top 11 automation tools you need to know in 2021. But the main one you should know about, based on what we talked about so far in this episode, is Playwright. Playwright has blown up this year. Everyone I've spoken with have talked about Playwright. So as you know, as we're getting pushed to create software not only faster and fast, but also with quality baked in, you need a way that you can validate your code but at the same time not slow down the development process. Because of this, headless testing has become more popular and using something like Playwright allows you to do a lot of type of testing headlessly. That makes it faster to execute and it's typically easier. And because of this, it's not going to slow down your developers and so developers are starting to embrace this type of headless automation as well. And one of those tools I think that's really going to help them in 2021 and beyond that you need to know about is Playwright. Playwright is a kind of. It's almost like a fork of Puppeteer, but it was taken over by Microsoft, so it's Microsoft Playwright, which is a open source. It started off as a Java based cross browser automation library for end to end testing. But they recently released versions that now support languages like Python, Java and C Sharp. A lot of big companies as well. Once again, I use companies as indicators to show me where the market is going, where people are investing money is probably where you want to invest your time as well. Now you look at companies like Testim. In 2020, they came out with a tool called Playground, which is a free recorder for Puppeteer and Playwright to create UI test as code. A company called Checkly I had on my podcast a few weeks ago came out with a headless recorder Chrome extension for recording browser interactions that generate Playwright and Puppeteer scripts. And the recorder allows you to record browser interactions that generate Playwright scripts. And I think the reason for this is actually writing from scratch. Playwright, a puppeteer, it can be tricky and also using it for monitoring can be tricky. So using a recorder can be really helpful. And you know, talking about monitoring with APIs, being able to use your automation test dual purpose, not only for just functional automation, but leveraging them for performance testing, security testing and monitoring is going to be a big deal. And I think using tools like Playwright are playing into that whole narrative now of not just automation from a functional perspective, but automation from a holistic end to end automation pipeline perspective. And I think Playwright is one of those tools you're going to need to know in order to achieve that in 2021 and beyond. So those are my top eight trends. Like I said, it's been a little scatterbrained right now because I didn't write this out, I'm just talking off the cuff. So the top trends I covered I think were the first one was more automation in 2021 and not just functional automation, but all kinds of automation. Number two was accessibility testing. Number three, cloud based or cloud native software development and testing collaboration is going to be a thing. Number four was visual or not visual, it was AIB Software assistance. Number five was automation pipelines, not automation. Number six was observability. Number seven we covered was API end to end testing. And number eight was playwright. And rather than AI assistance, I may have called it AI data. So those are the top eight trends you need to know for 2021. Like I said, I'm going to put this all together. I'm going to put it down in words. Hopefully it'd be more concise than what I talked about on the podcast. But if I missed anything, if I missed a point, let me know. I'll include it in the blog post and I'll give you credit. Just drop me a line@joetestgill.com hopefully you found this helpful and this sets you up for an awesome 2021. Thank you everyone that's been listening all along for the podcast and for all your support for all the previous years and then in the coming year. And as I mentioned at the beginning, if you haven't already, really if you want to accelerate your automation testing or really to know more about all the automation trends that are going to happen in 2021. How to prepare for them Definitely register for Automation Guild, which is an online conference dedicated 100% to helping you succeed with end to end automation. And this year it's not just going to be functional testing. I also took these trends into account when I was creating the conference. So the last two days are going to be also covering non functional testing like security testing, performance testing, accessibility testing, chaos engineering. All those other types of testing we covered here are going to be covered as well. So the first three days will be dedicated towards functional automation. So there's a three day ticket and then we're going to have a five day ticket that incorporates all end to end automation to help you with your full automation pipeline. For all the other trends we covered in this podcast as well, definitely register today. Head on over to guild conferences.com or automationguild.com and grab your ticket before it's too late. For links to everything and value we covered in this episode, head on over to testguild.com a34 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 Source Lab's awesome products and services. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe. My mission is to help you succeed with creating end to end full Stack Automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers.

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