Automation Testing Trends for 2024 with Joe Colantonio

As we enter 2024, what automation testing trends will shape the future that you need to know based on hundreds of expert interviews and funding patterns in the test automation space. So here are my top 12 trends you need to know for the future of test automation. And stay all the way to the end because you're probably going to be surprised by the last one. Also, make sure to subscribe and hit the bell to never miss another piece of automation awesomeness. First one is obvious, so let's get it out of the way. Number one is AI assisted testing. Boom. AI and machine learning will become even more integral to helping you boost your testing efficiency. But is any tester really using AI to help with testing now? Well, surprisingly, based on surveys like Lambda Test and the Test Guild webinar polls, most testers are already adopting AI into their workflows. So if you're not experimenting with AI and testing yet, you you're already behind. So the Lambda Test survey found that AI adoption among software testers was at 78%. In the Test Guild webinar on generative AI, 76% of testers say they're already using ChatGPT AI to help them with their day to day testing activities or they plan on doing so. And I think this already high adoption rate will grow even more as more choices in AI testing tool and platforms are going to proliferate across different Software teams in 2024 by but remember, real software testing obviously requires a deep understanding of the software under test, so it requires a real tester. However, it does not rule out AI assistance with many activities like automated test generation, intelligent test data creation, also things like predictive defect models and test optimization and prioritization and automated root cause analysis that I know a lot of guild members struggle with. Once again, all these activities require a human tester and to make sure the AI generated data is correct. But it doesn't rule out AI. Don't ignore AI. Also, another key indicator is companies investing in AI technologies. So in 2023 we saw platforms like Perfecto release Test Data Pro by Blazemeter, which leverages generative AI technology to simplify and enhance data creation. We saw Catalan announce True Test, which is an automated regression testing solution to leverage AI to generate and maintain regression test suites by monitoring user activities. And we saw companies like test results IO integrate gen AI to create test cases and also reflect integrate AI with a bunch of different functionality, including generative AI and also boosting playwright automation using AI. And if you think 2023 was crazy for AI and testing, I think you're going to see even more interesting developments in AI and testing, but with the recent release of multimodal AI, one example being Google Gemini. If you haven't heard, multimodal AI incorporates multi data types like text, images, speech and sensor inputs processing via different algorithms to enable more flexible automated testing capabilities. It's really cool because it's going to allow multimodal AI to enhance test automation with things like visual application validation, leveraging test bots to use computer vision alongside text processing to traverse and validate graphical interfaces in the way a human tester would. For greater test coverage, it's also going to expand to different types of testable applications that you probably weren't able to test before because it has the ability to interpret images, video, speech, all those things that people probably struggle with now with automating and it's going to help you a bunch of other things like mainstream accessibility integration. Those are just some quick examples I foresee happening in 2024 with multimodal AI with with AI automation testing. And I think this trend is so important. We've included a bunch of sessions at this year's Automation Guild to cover AI. We have one session, a practical guide to AI how to improve quality and software development. We also have From Code to Cognition the Journey of AI and Automation as just a few examples of what you'll get at Automation Guilds. If you haven't signed up for Automation Guild, you want to upskill yourself. To keep up with all these trends we cover in this video, head on over to automationguild.com and register today. My second trend two years in a row is testing for low code no code apps. So in a survey it showed that by 2025, 70% of newly developed applications will use low code and no code technologies, up from less than 25% in 2020. Because of this testing needs will grow exponentially. As adoption of low code no code app development spikes across companies, demand is going to surge for optimized automated testing solutions that are tailored for low code platforms. I think you need to focus on more end to end testing due to this because low code apps often support web, mobile and other channels which require automated testing across multi surfaces. There's also going to be some integration testing challenges. Connecting low code apps into existing systems requires API and integration testing for end to end flows that you're going to need to know more about. It's also going to enable non technical users to do more automation and you're going to need to focus on making it scalable across all your different application portfolios and how I know this is going to be important as well as companies that invested in 2023 is like kind of like a flag that shows me this is what companies will be focusing on in the new year as well. For example, UiPath, which is used mostly for RPA but also can be used for testing processes, introduced AI intelligence and will make it even simpler to automate almost any business task using natural language. Which natural language equals low code no code. Also, Applitools announced its acquisition of Preflight in 2023, which is a leading low code test automation platform. Why these companies investing in low code no code technology? Probably because they see that this is a trend that's going to be happening in 2024. So it's something you should pay attention to as well. And once again we're going to have a bunch of sessions on low code no code. At the Automation Guild we have a session on empowering product owners and other non technical team members to use low code test automation. And we're also going to have a real world session on how a tester approach testing an AI chatbot powered by Natural Language Processing. Number three on the list is API Test Automation. It's been on my list pretty much every year since I've been doing this, but I believe it's so important that you still need to pay attention to it. Because as you know, APIs serve as the connectivity fabric across systems in modern microservice architecture. And with APIs usage multiplying, automated API testing capabilities will need to expand in 2024 to validate not only functionality but also performance and security pre production. So some key aspects of API testing automation needed in 2024 are going to be functional validation. Obviously load and performance testing, executing high volumes of load tests against APIs to cover like latency bottlenecks and errors under load security testing validation is going to become more important. Contract validation, service virtualization simulation and service virtualization simulation is going to be a bigger trend as well. One example is PowerSoft that announced a AI powered API testing solution to help you with this. Postman announced Postbot AI which can help you with your testing and load mill and other companies as well. Karate Tricentis have all invested in API testing and I think we're going to see more trends with people using tools like Cypress and Playwright to help them not only with functional UI automation but also API testing. And because I believe in API testing so much, once again we have a bunch of sessions at this year's Automation Guild we have API Automation Mastery from novice to ninja Accelerating API testing using Cypress how to mock the unmarkable elevating your test automation stability through advanced API simulation and also a really important topic on safeguarding your digital assets, uncovering security risk in your APIs that you definitely should check out as well. And number four is shift left testing goes mainstream once again. Talking about shift left forever, but I think now it's just common. So I think it's going to become just the norm in 2024 because you're going to need to find bugs quicker and cheaper and DevOps teams are going to continue to shift testing left in the lifecycle to run earlier against cone changes in the CICD pipeline. So you're going to see a rise in unit testing, integrated testing, performance testing and more activities are definitely going to shift left and become the norm in 2024. So some other types of testing I think are going to move into the pipeline even more in 2024 as well. It's going to be component testing, integration testing, API contract testing, security scanning is going to be huge and also accessibility validation assessment for new features against accessibility standards to drive exclusion. Using automation I think is also going to be big in 2024 and we have two sessions on this at Automation Guild as well we have automated quality assurance reporting in your CICD pipelines and we also have a bunch of topics on shift left performance testing as well that you should definitely check out. The number five trend in 2024 is containers enable test environment consistency. So using containers to provision test environments provides consistency across stages, improves collaboration across teams and also helps enable automated environment provisioning. If you're not using containers yet for your test automation environments you need to it is one of the killers of an automation project and using containerization with your automated environments make it automated testing more scalable and more reliable for sure and some reasons for this it helps you isolate dependencies so replicating container packages and standardize all libraries, data and configs needed for code execution simplifies your test bed creation. It gives you a consistent environment and it helps you automate scaling and tear down with programmatically spinning up containerized test environments and pipeline stages, then automatically scaling up or down destroying them on demand and is huge to get you to scale and get all these shift left activities that we talked about more into your pipelines easier by being able to scale up all the environments, run your test as quickly as possible and just tear them down and destroy them. Going to be huge in 2024. Definitely want to get on it for sure so Number six is automated compliance testing acceleration. So over the past few years there have been a lot of regulations passed covering security, data privacy integration, industry standards and more. And I think automated compliance control validation is going to accelerate to keep pace with all these new laws and regulations in 2024. And it's human nature because I know many developers find manually validating controls required by regulations to be cumbersome busy work, whereas automation can execute and validate these control checks more frequently. So neglecting compliance testing automation makes achieving continuous delivery with governance impossible at scale. So that's why I think it's an area that's going to expand in 2024. Number seven. And self healing drives higher resiliency. So I think this will lead to more automated remediation capabilities. Things that kick in based on policies to auto rollback deployments or auto scale resources when health checks fail to help minimize downtime are going to be on the rise in 2024. And even with rigorous testing, production issues inevitably occur requiring rapid response. And when you're in production, manual processes really slow reaction time. So automated self healing mechanisms I think are going to proliferate in 2024. So some examples of some self healing capabilities I think that really going to take off are automated rollbacks, live container restarts, intelligent request routing, predictive auto scaling and graceful degradation functionality as well. And number eight is AIOps. So using big data and machine learning, AOPS platforms analyze volumes of telemetry info that's been huge in 2023 with open telemetry. A lot of companies investing in telemetry in 2023, you're going to need to know in 2024 and beyond. So telemetry, this type of information really helps teams quickly troubleshoot, predict, resolve operation issues. And so some examples of why AIOps is going to be more important in 2024. Type of features that are going to be bigger in the new year is anomaly detection. Helps you analyze metrics to automatically recognize anomalies for normal activities that indicate emerging issues. Log aggregation and analytics collection and quarterly massive log data volumes across systems to identify related events and rapid pinpoint root causes. Incident prediction, spot trends, predictions for future incidents like dis, space exhaustion, allowing proactive prevention. It's going to help you with things like automated remediation and also optimize cloud costs, continually tune infrastructure sizing based on utilization to optimize cloud cost. Leading examples of companies that have embraced this in 2023 and I think we're going to see more of in 2024 is like Dynatrace released Davis AI with Davis Copilot, Splunk announced Splunk AI and Datadog announced Bits AI. All these help you with AIOps and DevOps and all these tools were designed to help you with infrastructure growing exponentially in scale and complexity and how AIOps becomes essential for your teams to really effectively manage reliability and costs of these systems using AI. Number nine is increase Automated mobile App functional and Security Testing is going to be on the Rise the global Surge mobile application in 2024 requires more automated testing capabilities specifically for real world end to end user scenarios as well as mobile apps with validation against things like security, owasp mobile top 10 threats and some key mobile testing focused growth areas you're going to see in 2024 is more need for real device testing, but more end to end workflow testing, cross browser and OS validation. Also native performance testing and like I said, OWASP mobile security validation I think is going to be on the rise as well. And you need to know how to address these unique testing needs of mobile testing because it's a different approach than you would normally find with UI testing. So 2024 testing solutions need to keep up with the faster mobile release cycles we've been seeing. So neglecting mobile test automation really threatens your customer experience and security and that's why it's so important in 2024. And once again we have some companies that just give a little indicator of where they're investing the money and why this is probably important for you to know as well. For example, Tricentis acquired Waldo, which is a codeless development in the field of mobile test automation, which I think is going to be a bigger development in 2024. Also Mable released mobile testing features to help you with Android and iOS app testing, and companies like Game Driver and Kobiton announced partnerships to elevate mobile game development and testing, which I think is a area of growth as well. In 2024 and Automation Guild we're going to have two sessions. The first one is removing the pain from mobile test automation and the other one is going to be a 90 minute workshop called Mastering X UI Test Native iOS testing that you're going to get a lot of value from as well. Number 10, the rise of testing in production and non deterministic testing. So because a lot of people are using SaaS application and cloud based application user volumes balloon to millions and accurately mimicking production scale and test labs really proves almost to be impossible. And this leads to teams conducting final validation of new features safely to well instrumented Production testing, which I think will be on the rise in 2024. And also sophisticated observability tooling allows deep inspection of behavior and performance. So we're also going to see the rise of non deterministic testing. So going on the days of test environments and full control and deterministic order of operations that we had back in the day when I was coming up as a tester. So nowadays we have multi cloud microservices and external APIs introducing a lot of unpredictability. So test automation is going to need to evolve in 2024 to handle these non deterministic systems. And here's an area I think we're going to see AI step in with some techniques to help you for smart test generation and assertion guidance for non deterministic pathways. So we're going to see an increase in innovations and production testing observability. So observability is going to be huge, but you can only make something observable that was built to be observable. So this leads me to trend number 11. All this is going to lead to developing for observability. So the same struggles we saw with automation testing, security testing and performance testing, you can't make something automatable that wasn't built to be automatable. You can't make something testable that wasn't built to be testable. You can't make something performant that wasn't built to be performant. Once again in 2024 we're going to see observability shift left and make it so you can't make something observable if it wasn't built to be observable. So as teams increasingly test directly in production environments at scale, substantial improved observability, its applications and infrastructure performance becomes mandatory. In 2024 if you don't have this, especially in testing and production, without strong observability, it's going to have limited production test data visibility, you have the inability to access broader customer impacts, you'll find slower detection of failures from new features if you don't have observability baked in. And also you can have a lack of production telemetry to validate fixes. So by developing for observability upfront, as developers are creating code to make it more observable, teams are going to be able to create safer production testing and release capabilities like traceability, fine grained metrics which help you really quantify performance impacts. Logs provide rich context in error conditions. And dashboards create quickly highlight regression issues that you need to be aware of. So because testing and production is going to be on the rise in 2024, you're going to need to invest in observability. And once again, how can you learn more if you're into testing and how you can help inform your teams around observability and how to make better choices of testing and production? We got you covered. Our Automation Guild, we have four different sessions. We have an interactive story about observability and synthetic testing, we have integrating DevOps and Biz Ops for enhanced automation abilities, and we have distributed system observability using open telemetry at this year's event. And so for the most controversial trend I have picked out for 2024, number 12 is the most popular automation tool at the end of 2024 will be playwright by a landslide. So I speak to a lot of testing experts on my podcast. I also predicted in 2023 that I saw Microsoft Playwright as possibly being the reigning champion of web based automation testing tools. And I think I was proven correctly. And I will say upfront, I think 2024 will be the year of Playwright as the dominant automation testing tool for the new year. And if you use a tool like star history.com to plot the history of likes or stars on GitHub, you could see how Playwright has drastically overtaken both Selenium and Cypress as the most widely used test automation tool. And while not a scientific or optimal way to gauge tool adoption or which one's the best, we're not saying which one's the best, it's just gauging interest on popularity. I do find GitHub stars to be a trackable indicator that you can least use to get a pulse for what people are trending towards. So for example, at the time of this recording, Playwright's growing popularity is evident by its 57,000 stars on GitHub, far surpassing Selenium's 25,000 stars and Cypress's 45,000 stars. And as Playwright continues its rapid ascent, multiple testing thought leaders have voiced optimism about its future dominance. Many people I talk to, vendors as well have started adopting Playwright into their solutions. So as Playwright continues its rapid ascent, multiple testing thought leaders I've spoke to has voiced optimism about its future dominance. For instance, many folks have told me that Playwright solves many pain points they've experienced and had teams have experienced with previous tools, and they rave about how the API design is top notch and the multi browser support has been a game changer for their test automation strategy. Some also predict that as more teams struggle with limitations of older tools, Playwright will become a go to recommendation for test automation for modern web app testing and many vendors I speak to many people on my show has started to really think Playwright first when they're thinking of new features to add to their solution as well. And if experts predictions prove accurate, I expect Playwright to claim the test automation throne in 2024 based on its impressive momentum and ability to address common test automation challenges right out of the box. So if you haven't tried Playwright, give it a whirl and let me know your thoughts as I think it's going to be a tool you must need to know as an Astat as a tester in 2024. So those are my top 12 trends for 2024. To find more definitely check out all the links down below in the comments. And while you're there once again like and subscribe to get more automation testing awesomeness in 2024 and as always test everything and keep to good Cheers.