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A survey of 900 application testing professionals conducted by PractiTest, a provider of a platform for managing testing tools, suggested the number of organizations that have dedicated testing teams is declining at a steady rate.
The survey found a 15% decrease in organizations with dedicated testing teams that have six or more members. At the same time, however, the survey found only 18% of respondents reported that all testing is done by individuals that are not part of a dedicated testing team.
Joel Montvelisky, test specialist and chief solution architect at PractiTest, said that shift indicates that more organizations are steadily incorporating testing within DevOps workflows. In fact, more than 60% of respondents said DevOps and Agile processes led to teams being more organized and stable, with two-thirds (66%) reporting that development teams were releasing features more frequently with more functionality.
However, only 38% of respondents said they were active participants in a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow. A full 90% said they needed to coach or train other members within the team and just over half (54%) reported that estimations of the time required for development and testing were accurate.
Two-thirds also said collaboration with developers is also improved when applying DevOps processes, with more than half reporting fewer serious bugs made it into production. More than half also said they monitor software in production and deployment environments. The number of testers who defined themselves as engineers has gone up by 14% year-over-year. However, only 44% report that automation has replaced 50% or more of their manual testing efforts.
A full 95% or more of survey respondents identified application programming interface (API) testing, Agile methodologies, functional testing and scripting as high on their list of priorities. In contrast, big data testing, internet of things (IoT) testing and machine learning/artificial intelligence (AI) testing were cited as important or very important by only 60% of respondents.
Finally, about a third of survey respondents noted that non-testers are now involved in testing activities.
Montvelisky said the PractiTest survey makes it clear that while developers are a little more involved in testing than they were a few years ago, organizations still relied on testing specialists that are becoming more integrated into DevOps workflows. This is especially important as more organizations launch digital business transformation initiatives that require them to build software using the same types of DevOps processes that independent software vendors (ISVs) employ.
It’s still too early to say just how far testing might shift left toward developers, but as testing becomes more automated—thanks, in part, to increased reliance on AI—the types of tests that will be conducted by a dedicated testing team will evolve. In fact, it’s unlikely automation will eliminate the need for those teams any time soon. Rather, testers will be augmented by AI technologies that will help them to keep pace with the accelerated rate of application development enabled by wider adoption of DevOps best practices within organizations both large and small.
