Automation Trends to Watch in 2023 with Joe Colantonio

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Get ready to discover the most actionable end to end automation advice for some of the smartest testers on the planet. Hey, I'm Joe Calantonio, host of the Test Guild Automation Podcast and my goal is to help you succeed with creating automation awesomeness.

Hey it's Joe and welcome to another episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast and Happy New Year. Like we do every year since we started in 2014 with the podcast, in 2010 with the blog is we do our top picks or trends for the new year. So Here are my top 13 automation trends or software testing trends for 2023. You don't want to miss it, check it out. The Test Guild Automation Podcast is sponsored by the fantastic folks at Source Labs, the cloud based test platform, and that helps ensure you can develop with confidence at every step from code to deployment. For every framework, browser, OS, mobile device and API, get a free trial. Visit testskill.comsourcelabs and click on the exclusive Sponsor section to try it for free today. Check it out.

So every year I pick up on trends gleaned from interviewing tons of folks on my podcast during the year, as well as news stories featured on my test skill DevSecOps news show. Also, developments in the previous year set up trends for the following year. And one key that always acts as a leading indicator for a trend is money invested in certain companies. So with that in mind, I've compiled a list of the top automation trends for 2023, just like I've been doing for the past 12 years. So the first trend is innovation in mobile testing. Now mobile testing has been over the past years on my list this year. I think it's a little bit different in that the tooling within mobile application automation hasn't had the same amount of, you know, time to develop compared with web application automation. And I think web mobile automation is still in its infancy as far as what tools and frameworks are available to allow you to combat that flakiness and help maintain your scripts. But based on 2022, I see this changing. So where over the past few years AI machine learning has been focused mainly on web based testing, I see this extending even more now to mobile. And the new tech trend that we're currently seeing ourselves in is commercialized artificial intelligence. And that's why we're seeing more and more codeless, scriptless mobile automation solutions that is now AI driven. And so I've talked to a few people over this year that kind of point the way towards the future. The first one is mobot and I'll have a link to this, but Mobot is a mobile app testing service which is powered by supervised mechanical robots. And the best way to think of Mobots is to think of a fleet of, say, mechanical fingers in the cloud that interact with your mobile devices or a hardware device just like a real user. So this is really cool technology I think we want to see more of. Kobiton has constantly been releasing new technology focused on mobile, but specifically mobile AI technology. So they have a lot of scripted, scriptless, type of Appium automated scripts, but they have like a wrapper on top of it where they have a really intelligent AI driven algorithm in their intelligent quality suite that can help overcome a lot of the issues you face with Appium tests. But it has AI kind of on top of it to help you with that. And another company that comes to mind that I interviewed in 2022 was Loadmill. They leverage APIs for all kinds of test automation, including mobile test automation, which you'll learn more about later in this episode. All right, some key indicators is money. So if we take a look at. So one of the companies I just mentioned is Moba and they actually secured $15 million in August. And you can see Waldo raised 15 million for its automated mobile testing service. So anytime you see money, money is like a vote for where investors are saying the trends are going. So definitely here's one example and one other example is a company called Waldo. Anytime you see money flowing in a direction, you should pay attention. And that's why I think 2023 is going to be the year where we see mobile testing, a lot more investment in these tools and technologies to help you with your mobile testing efforts. And I think this is so important that we decided to include multiple sessions on mobile testing at this year's Automation Guild. And if you don't know, Automation Guild is an online event that happens every year. We're having our seventh annual online event taking place February 6th to the 10th of 2023. You definitely don't want to miss out. And if you go to automationguild.com and scroll down to the speakers, you'll be able to see all the sessions that are going on this year. What I do is I poll our audience every year, previous Guild members, and ask them what topics they're struggling with. And based on their answers, I find speakers to cover it. And also based on my research throughout the year, top trends. We also try to find sessions that are going to help you really accelerate your career and in the new year. And as I mentioned, one of those areas is mobile testing. So if you could see we have multiple sessions on mobile testing that really are going to help your testing efforts. So don't miss it if you haven't already registered now@automationguild.com so almost everyone I spoke with this year, whether on my podcast or live events, brought up accessibility testing. And over the year every major testing technique has slowly been shifting left in the software development lifecycle. So we saw this happen with automation test and functional automation. All of a sudden we had developers started to get in the game and we shift this left in our CI CD platforms. We also started moving performance testing and I've also recently seen security testing make the shift as well. And that's why I'm predicting that 2023 will be the year that continuous accessibility testing is going to make this shift. So I actually spoke to Tamar, who is a founder of a startup company called Senseit during an applitools Future of Testing event and Tamar is developing automated testing for digital accessibility. And that's where it kind of got my mind rolling and thinking about this being one of the trends for this year. She said that her team started working on accessing digital products manually for clients and over time they found this process to be really tedious and it started to be really resemble a digital hamster wheel where clients dependent on them to test, assess, return for remediation, reassess the product after remediation and continue this process repeatedly. And Tamar mentioned that this knowledge of accessibility testing really needs to be in the hands of the company. And I agree. Accessibility testing, compliance testing, assessment must be addressed early on and continuously. So you need an automated solution that knows how to do the interactions just like you're doing with functional testing and tomorrow's vision and the one I've seen applied to both security and performance testing is the ability to leverage your functional tests to find and use those interact with the product from an accessibility perspective. So taking your existing functional test and then adding extra features that also allow you to also use it for accessibility testing so you can simultaneously test accessibility while executing your test automation by leveraging the functional testing script that your company already has, I definitely see this as a trend. So keep your eye open for continuous accessibility in 2023. So as you all know, automated testing is essential for balancing software quality with accelerated velocity of releasing cycles. But because the tool chain that's supposed to enable automation testing has many moving parts, test automation often becomes a parallel development project in organizations. Plus they have all this upfront ongoing resources, tech and Expertise costs. This to me has led to a new breed of test management systems that I've been hearing more about on my podcast that I think are only going to grow more in popularity in 2023. And this is not your father's Test director. These are platforms designed for modern software testing. And although automation capabilities for testing have mainly been solved by tools like Playwright, Appium, Selenium and other frameworks, there's still a gap in the industry for a unified platform to help manage the entire the entire automation lifecycle. And so that's where I think test management systems or these super test management systems are going to come into play more and more, especially at large enterprises. We have a lot of people that aren't necessarily experts in coding and these other activities. You need to really do a proper automation framework from scratch. So a few of these examples from my podcast are Test Sigma. Test Sigma is a unified, fully customized platform that works out of the box. It's built to help you create end to end tests to help test web and mobile apps even faster. And also APIs in English like syntax that has self healing enabled maintenance, free testing functionality, all those things. So out of the box you have this framework that that is almost like a layer on top of some of these other Selenium and Appium and gives you this extra functionality and also helps you manage the testing process, your test cases, test results and all the things. So that's one example. Another one I heard about from this year is Test Results IO. They're a little more unique where they do image based automation, but because of this they can automate anything. So they can automate a mobile device, they can automate a desktop, they can automate a web app on me anything. So if you think of like a visual validation tool like applitools, but mix it with Sakooli, but with the the reliability of something like applitools be able to then drive business functionality using image based automation that makes it really reliable and also you can use it across all the platforms, all the oss, all the things. So that's another trend I've been seeing. So test results IO end of 2022 and I know they're going to do a lot of this in 2023 is Tricentis has invested in a new Test Automation SaaS product that delivers frictionless access to an intuitive UI that helps speed learning and accelerate automation. It has the whole team together in one platform. You can access and reuse test assets and build complex multi app test cases leveraging your team's expertise and it really helps simplify and accelerate automation. They've also inquired companies like Testim. So I see this as a platform that's only going to grow over time. And so these are some examples I think you definitely should follow. And if you follow the money, if you look at Test Sigma, they actually raised 4.6 million this in 2022. So that's just a clear indicator that companies are also investing in this technology as well, right? Trend number four is Data Ops and last year I mentioned the rise of cloud native testing. I believe that DataOps is the result of the shift to cloud native because this shift, there's way more volume and more sources spread across more clouds, making it even more challenging to discover, manage and control data. So I recently had the pleasure of hosting an online event by RTTS Query Surge dedicated to data testing in December 2022. And Bill Haddock, who is the founder of RTTS, told me that according to the recent IDC study, 80% of organizations are storing more than half the data in hybrid or multi cloud infrastructures. He also said that 79% of organizations have over 100 data sources and 30 have over a thousand. And this data is flowing in all applications, websites and everywhere. And only 6% of organizations say they have a plan in place to actually be able to handle all the data management functions across all these different platforms. And also Gartner had an interesting quote. Gartner said was poor quality cost organizations on average 12.9 million and it's increasing the complexity of data ecosystems that leads to poor decision making. Also, good data quality provides better leads, better understanding customers and better relationships. And also data quality is a competitive advantage that data and analytics leader needs to improve upon continually. So Garner feels that this is a big spotlight on data and data quality. And also the World Quality Report has a survey which has a population of 7,000 executives across multiple sectors from different countries. One of the interesting things that I think for the first time in 14 years, the world Quality Report mentioned data validation. And they said that 80% of those polled agreed that a robust data validation capability will not only improve efficiencies in terms of time and resources, but more importantly will help improve business decision making. They also said that 88% agree that a robust data validation capability has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and on the accuracy of insights that will help boost business profitability. And so this is why I think data being able to validate data is going to be a critical skill you're going to need in 2023 and beyond. And if you want to look at some tools in the space, definitely Query Surge is one of them. Has a smart data testing solution that automates the data validation and ETL testing of big data data warehouses and business intelligence reports. And it also integrates one of the few tools actually that integrates with DevOps for data, so allows you to automate your pipeline with the tool for your data validation. And I'm sure this is going to be a big trend that's only going to grow more and more. So you definitely want to check this out if you haven't already. And this might actually explain the next trend, which I actually was kind of surprised about. And that is testers will also need to know SQL. So if you've been around for a while, SQL has been around for a while, but it's one of the ways you actually can interact with data to pull information, do queries and joins and everything to actually get the information need to do validation. So it's a skill that's really critical when you're dealing with data. And according to the IEEE Spectrum top programming language of 2022, there's been a rising popularity of SQL and so they look at hundreds of job descriptions and based on this information and they found the most popular one in the for programming language is SQL. In fact it's their number one in their job rankings which looks solely at metrics from job sites like Career Builder and the IEEE job site. So employers aren't looking just for SQL coders, looking for people with skills plus SQL. So someone that is a Java testing expert plus NoSQL or is a Python testing expert plus NoSQL. So a lot of them has a want of plus SQL in the job description. So you may ask, so what I'm a tester, what does this mean for me? What what I did is I went to the top 20 Silicon Valley companies and I went through their job descriptions. I put them all together for their what they're looking for. I put them in a word cloud and to see what pops up to see if it matches the programming side of it. And I'll have a link for this if you listen to the audio only version of this podcast. So as we can see from this, it's also true from developers perspective is also true for testers as I did do a search for test automation and SQL and found multiple jobs looking for automation engineers that also know SQL. And this word cloud just proved it out as well. So speaking of data, get ready for our number six trend and that is the rise of Synthetic data in testing so if you don't know Synthetic data is artificially generated data that is designed to mimic real world data and it can be used in a variety of contexts, including software development and testing. In software development, synthetic data can be used to test and debug code without the need for real world data. And this could be especially useful in use cases where it's difficult or impossible to obtain real world data or where using real data could pose a risk. For example privacy concerns. If you work for medical devices, you can't be using real patient data. Synthetic data can be used for those scenarios and also edge cases that may be difficult to test with real world data and with software testing. Synthetic data can be used to test the functionality and performance of a software application. It can help ensure the application is working correctly and as intended, and can be used to stress test the application, see how it performs under heavy load. So overall, synthetic data can be a valuable tool in software development and testing and allows developers and testers to work with data that is similar to real world data, but without the limitations of a risk associated with using real data. Your tests are only as good as your data. A lot of people overlook this. You're not using realistic data. Your tests are pretty much useless. And as you know, data is the livelihood of modern artificial intelligence. And getting the data right, especially in testing, is one of the most important and most challenging parts of building a robust test suite that can also leverage AI. So this is probably why I've heard more and more companies that focus on this space. So having access to quality fake data is useful across software development life cycles, from the sandbox environment to development environment to staging to testing the QA throughout your CICD pipelines. So one example of this is Tonic. So Tonic is a platform that has all the tools you need to generate your data for your teams the way you need it. So the way Tonic works, it points directly at your production databases. You can then point Tonic to different databases of different types based on your data needs. And it can then use its built in generators and these generators could then be used, kind of like building blocks to mix and match specifics to the data types that you need, or trying to protect or synthesize and fake. Another solution, mostly AI, completely removes the need to use production data or create dummy data, which is what many testers are still using. Apart from some many clear privacy concerns that we touched upon that comes with this. It's also a massive time thief, with a huge chunk of your average time spent writing test data, which is what no one wants to do. So using these data tools can help you scale up your synthetic data creation, improving the reliability of your test, improving your test scenarios. And also Gartner once again predicts that 20% of all test data for customer facing use cases will be synthetically generated by 2025. So it's a perfect time for you to get on board the synthetic data train. It's a growing trend. I think it fills a huge void that I've been seeing over my 25 plus years in the industry. Also, if you follow the money, once again, investors agree with this trend as well. As you can see, In January of 2022 mostly AI raised 25 million to help further commercialize the synthetic data in Europe and the US and also this was in 2021, but still I think it carries over into 2023. Tonic raise 35 million series B to help engineers create synthetic data sets. So we talked about a lot about AI and I think it's only going to grow even more. So trend seven is using AI in production. So using AI in production to help test your application is another trend I've heard more about in 2022. And one interesting user case is using production user interaction and then based on that interaction, automatically generating API tests based on real user data. And this is great because it's able to realize what real users are using in production as well as all the connections and the APIs are being called and it automatically will generate the test scripts for you. So one of those solutions that actually does this is Loadmill and I spoke to them on my podcast in 2022. Loadmill is a test automation platform focused on backend and API testing. And it's an AI algorithm that can analyze your user behavior and automatically turn that analyzed traffic into automated API tests. You can even import data from monitoring solutions like datadog and all the monitoring solutions and feed it into loadmill. Loadmill then takes all that info and creates an uber realistic real world user based automated testing scenario automatically. So think of a web automated recording tool, but this is for APIs. So there's one user case I think a lot of other companies are going to be following also in 2023. And I've also seen other tools that take production data and automatically create real world models for you that you can then generate automated tests for. And I think these tests are even more reliable because looking at the recordings and analyzing from a QA perspective brings you closer to what the actual customers are doing in production. Another use case for AI production is helping Automate infrastructure in production. For instance, one company I spoke with is Occamus, and they focus on optimizing your apps with smart and safe autonomous tuning in production. So I spoke with Stefano Donnie, co founder and CTO at Alchemist, my Performance Insight reliability podcast in 2022, and he talked about how their solution can observe applications in production over time. It could then understand the parts of your application along with your traffic patterns. And based on that history, the DI models could then make recommendations or automatic adjustments to fix issues that occur before your users even realize it. So I think these types of solutions are primed for massive growth in 2023. So speaking of API microservices, with modern software development, how do you handle the challenge that comes with in an API development first world? Well, look at API simulation. So API simulation has been around for a while, but in 2022 I've heard more and more of it. So I think 2023 we're really going to hear even more about it. So API simulation is the process of simulating the behavior of an application programming interface to test the functionality and performance of a software application. So in software testing, API simulation involves creating a simulation of an API and using it to test the application rather than using the real API. And API simulation can be used in several different contexts. For example, it can be used to test the integration of an application with an external API, such as the third party service or an internal API within an organization. It can also be used to test the performance and reliability of an application under various conditions, such as high traffic or different network configurations. So to see this in action, also check out the webinar I did in 2022 with Powersoft's Grigori on taking control of your test environment with API simulations, which actually shows you how this is done in the real world. So API simulation, also known as service virtualization, is something that comes it stands in when you don't really have access to the dependencies, don't have access to the real system, and you want to mock something that's involving and this is something you're going to see more and more of because we have all These microservices and APIs and Kubernetes environments all over the place. So how do you mimic that when you don't actually have access to a real environment or the real service at a given time? So I spoke to Chris Colosimo of Tricentis and he told me over the last two years have been transformative to a lot of software that's out there. So Folks are delivering software in ways that they didn't even anticipate at all when they would have maybe two years ago. And with that, it calls for a lot of change in architecture and a lot of change of services and rapidly deploying services. So using API simulation can get new products delivered into our customer hands in a way that the modern world really needs. So I think we're going to see an explosion of service virtualization concepts coming into play over the next couple of years. Think about it. When things happen in parallel and they're not ready, they're not available, they're not stable, what do you do? These are the hallmarks of why you need to use service virtualization. And obviously, API simulation is a valuable tool in software testing because it allows developers and testers to test the application while having to rely on the availability or functionality of the real API. All right, every year I always get asked, what programming language should I use? So I threw this in because I do it every year. Even though it hasn't changed much from 2022, test engineers usually always want to know what programming languages they should learn. I've seen a few sites that track the popularity in languages, and many of them have them listed in a similar order with Python being one and Java being number two. So once again, people say that's great if you're a developer, but what does this mean for an SDA or a tester? So just for fun, once again, I looked at the job descriptions of test engineers in the top 20 Silicon Valley companies and then it created a word cloud to find out if there was any correlation between popular languages and and the skills companies are looking for. And as you can see by the word cloud, it pops up Python and Java as two of the most popular programming languages that actually people are looking for when they're looking for an automation test engineer or a test engineer in general. So if you're looking for a language and you haven't yet, definitely look at either Python or Java. You can't go wrong. All right, next trend is self service cloud development environments. Man, I know almost every company that spoke to me in 2022. A lot of them were promoting self service cloud development environments, except platforms that allow developers to quickly set up and configure their own development environments in the cloud. And these environments typically provide a range of tools and resources developers can use to develop, test and deploy software applications. So why should you care? Well, in my interview with Bunny Shells, Shani Shahomy, he says it basically solves the problem of it works on My machine, which drives all testers crazy. So these technologies create full stack production replicas in the cloud. So tell me if this sounds familiar. So most organizations have developers working on local Docker instances. Then they then merge into the main branch and it doesn't work because the main branch is different. And often the versions they flocked, it's already an old version. They then spend a lot of time reworking the code to merge that into a staging environment. Of course, the staging environment is also different. They then run the test there, find bugs, they get back to the developer, and again they rework the code and rebuild the application. Then it goes into testing and it starts all over again. And this is a very, very lengthy and unproductive process. Instead, a better way would be to use a technology to trigger full stack environments with every pull request in the cloud. So you can immediately show the environment with the product for the application of the test with QA for testing purposes. So QA does the testing on an isolated environment, and you can do as much testing in parallel branches as you need. So if you detect a bug, it's effortless to isolate bugs to the specific branch. Developer could then connect using remote developer tools, connect to that environment and make changes to the cloud or that environment in the cloud, and the QA will immediately see those changes. So no need to rebuild and wait again and again and again. And once everyone's happy, you merge the code, tear down the environment, and that's it. And this is a big advantage because it's a full stack environment. The code quality that developers can produce is much higher. The feedback loop between developer and QA is much, much faster. And the bottleneck of having one or two shared staging environments and everybody is merging into that. And testing doesn't happen when you use a bunny shell like solution. So some companies I talked to this year that have this type of solution is BunnyShell, UFizi, Release Hub are just a few you should definitely check out. So speaking of all these environments, all these types of things you need to do to keep everything healthy, to keep the development process going on quicker and faster. Enter platform engineering. If you don't know, Platform engineering is a discipline that focuses on designing, developing and maintaining of software platforms. And a software platform is a set of technologies or tools that provide a foundation for building, deploying and running your software applications. Platform engineering, which I think testers fit in perfectly that you can help with this problem. It's a lot of activities that it solves, like designing and implementing the infrastructure and tools needed to support the testing process, including continuous integration and continuous delivery. Platform engineering also focuses on on setting up and configuring test environments, including environments for automated tests, performance tests, security tests, developing and maintaining test frameworks and libraries that can be used to automate the testing process and also can help you with collaborating with other teams such as development and operations to ensure that the platform is reliable, scalable and easy to use. Overall, platform engineering plays a key role in software testing by providing the foundation and infrastructure needed to support the testing process. So by designing and maintaining a robust platform, platform engineers can help to ensure the quality and reliability of the software applications built on top of it. So you may be asking, okay, platform engineering, what does it have to do with automation? As we already said, it absolutely helps with testing. If you're a tester, here's an area you can actually help with and actually expand your skill set. If you search for platform engineering, it's becoming more more popular as a skill that companies are looking for. It's kind of like the SRE of 2023 I think. And also according to Evan Diggildo who I've Interviewed also in 2022, automation is the end game of platform engineering, developing tools to automate process that make developers software development lifecycle more effortless. I think this is an area you could focus more on in 2023 and also highly a growing trend that's going to be probably a good place to learn more about to help your career as well. And finally the biggest trend. You're probably sick of hearing it already, but it is AI assistance in automation testing. And just last month in December, you've probably heard a lot about ChatGPT by now. If not, check out my special edition of my new show where I highlight how it can automatically generate. So you could say, hey ChatGPT, create me a selenium test that goes to testguild.com and does a search for Selenium and it will automatically create it. It will know the element ID and so you can automatically generate Selenium tests, Cypress tests, Playwright tests, webdriver, IO scripts, whole bunch of different scripts and while they're not perfect, it's going to really be a great starting point and think highlights the direction that AI assisted automation is going. So it's a great starting point for you to then fix and modify and verify that it's doing what you expect. While it's not replacing development skills or testers by a long shot. This is a great starting point and a huge, huge time saver. Just beware. I'm already seeing people already dissing this adulting as this is nothing. This is all smoke and mirrors. You know, this is just the first generation. It's only been trained on 2021 data. Just think after two or three more years where this technology is going to go. I'm telling you, you better pay attention because this is something you need to know. Because I think it's actually going to change the game as we know it in automation and testing and development and the world basically. Maybe you overhyped, but I'm telling you, it's kind of like Google was in the early days or even automation testing. A lot of people would say automation testing is really testing now. Automation testing is really hot. It's the same thing with AI and chat gbt. I think it's gonna be on the forefront of what you need to know. It's only gonna get smarter and more sophisticated. So that's the top trend for 2023 that you need to know about. If you haven't stopped messing around with ChatGPT, you definitely should check it out and learn how to ask better questions. Guys think Maybe that's number 13 of what the top trends are, is the ability to ask better questions. Because over time a lot of these tools are going to be doing the heavy lifting for you, but you're going to need to know what questions to actually ask to get the information that you need. So one of the questions I always get asked after podcasts like this is like, will AI replace me or will the current recession scare that's looming at the horizon jeopardize my job? And I'll be honest, no one can truly predict the way things will turn out because that's beyond our control. But in my 25 years of field experience, in my Hubble opinion. But what you can do is make sure you're always armed and ready with the latest info on current tech, which I could tell if you already listened all the way to the end. You're one of those people. What you can also do is stay up to date with the industry, know how and relevant trends. What you can also do is stay up to date with the industry, know how and relevant trends. What you can also do is always strive to improve your skill set and build on on solid network. That way you'll always be in demand, regardless of how things turn out. And because that's exactly how I survived, even thrived over the decades, no matter the scare or its consequences. And it's one of the reasons why I created Automation Guild. If you're serious and you want to really separate yourself from the pack and gain an elusive edge in your career in 2023. You need to register for Automation Guild 2023 now. Since I designed it to address many of these trends we covered in this post, you definitely should head over to automationguild.com, check out our speakers, check out all the sessions, check out our community. You get access to our private community. I think it's really going to help your career in your automation efforts in the New year. So celebrate the New year by investing in yourself to supercharge your end to end automation testing skills and get the leg up in your career in 2023. Those are my trends. Let me know if I miss anything and hope to see you at Automation Guild this year. And for links of everything value we covered in this episode, head on over to test guild.com a430 and while you're there, make sure to click on the Try for Free Today link under the Exclusive Sponsor section to learn all about our awesome sponsor Sauce Labs. So that's it for this episode of the Test Guild Automation Podcast. I'm Joe and my mission is to help you succeed in creating end to end automation awesomeness. As always, test everything and keep the good. Cheers. Hey, thanks again for listening. If you're not already part of our awesome community of 27,000 of the smartest testers, DevOps and automation professionals in the world, we'd love to have you join the fam@testguild.com and if you're in the DevOps automation software testing space or your test tool provider and want to offer real world value that can improve the skills or solve a problem for the Guild community, I'd love to hear from you. Head ON over to testguild.info and let's make it happen.