With a decade gone by, the time was right to look back on the past 10 years and have a look on all that has happened in software testing. And a lot did happen!

A short recap

We are going through a 4th industrial revolution – or should I say a digital revolution? We heard people talk about the year 2010 and the rise of the smartphone. A few years later, everyone was talking about the cloud, the Internet Of Things and Big Data. And these past few years, Artificial Intelligence was the talk of the town. Things are evolving fast. And this had and will continue to have a tremendous impact on software testing. We are wondering what this could look like in the year 2030. So, we thought it would be interesting to pretend it’s already 2030 and look back from there!

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Today is the 1st of January in the year 2030. Time to reflect on what happened during the past decade. What went on in the software testing business these past 10 years?

Buzz-word: hyperautomation

While the previous decade (2010-2020) was all about Agile and Automated Testing, you might say that the past decade (2020-2030) was similar, but in a more advanced form. Just think about the word of the year in 2023: hyperautomation. The complete adoption of DevOps made the day-to-day activities of a software tester a lot more technical. The need for continuous automation of processes and scripts, meant that there was a lot of time spent learning and applying new specialized tools.

Terabytes implanted under our skin.

Between 2010 and 2020 we focused on User Interface based test automation with Selenium and when talking about “the future” IOT was the next big thing. The last 10 years have been all about developing mature frameworks (to avoid the use of User Interfaces), making use of Machine Learning & voice interfaces and IOT in combination with huge amounts of Big Data. Luckily, we can now hold multiple Terabytes implanted under our skin.
Next to that, set up of application monitoring to be able to proactively detect problems, has gained most attention. The number of solutions to support this, has almost tripled the past few years.

Shift-left, mission completed

And finally, you might say that the past decade we have completed the shift-left. This had a serious impact on the skills of the software tester, who has generally evolved even more towards a multi-facetted QA Engineer, who is capable of speaking in terms of the business and translating efficient testing approaches into automated processes, while focusing on overall software quality. With more extensive focus on User Experience, the role of the software tester has become more interesting and versatile than ever before.

We are now finally on the verge of applying Artificial Intelligence and to fully leverage it in our day-to-day activities. Exciting times are up ahead.

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Curious to see what the next decade will bring. We’re up for it!

Written by Pieter Chiau