DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2022. Part 7, the final installment, covers quality and testing.

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 4

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 5

Start with: 2022 DevOps Predictions - Part 6

STILL STRUGGLING WITH: WHO OWNS SOFTWARE QUALITY?

Unfortunately, I think we're going to continue to see organizations struggle with determining who should "own" software quality. We've been watching this battle for decades, and I'm not sure we're all that close to seeing it come to a close. First it was in-house testers, then companies looked to off-shore or near-shore testing, then it came back internally, while other companies got rid of their testing teams entirely. Then, orgs wanted to just automate "all" their testing; that proved impossible and completely ill-advised, and currently, we're seeing orgs look to move as much of their testing as possible over to their engineers. Personally, I think the answer is that everyone should own software quality, and organizations owe it to their customers to make it as easy as possible for any employee, not just developers or testers, to find and report bugs, collect invaluable feedback from customers, and quickly remediate issues. I don't think we get there in 2022, but my hope is that we make progress.
Noel Wurst
Software Testing Evangelist and Sr. Manager, Communications, SmartBear

QUALITY DEFINED BY USER EXPERIENCE

As organizations double down on digital, the concept of quality will evolve from "does it work" to "is it the best experience." However, the race to deliver innovation to market faster than competitors is causing challenges for software teams. More frequent releases multiplied by an explosion of device/browser combinations and increased application complexity — due to dependencies on internal microservices, third party services or content management systems — has exponentially increased the complexity of software quality. As we look towards 2022, dev teams will need ways to get faster feedback on quality pre-release (such as accelerating cross-browser/device validation) and shift-right practices (such as "testing in production") to capture regressions in the digital experience introduced post-release by dependencies outside of their control.
Mark Lambert
VP and Evangelist, Applitools

COMPLIANCE AS CODE

As CIOs and DevOp leaders enter 2022, development test environments will see an increase in adopting compliance as code. Enforcing policies that are testable, enforceable, shareable, trusted and actionable will be the top priority throughout the next year.
Prashanth Nanjundappa
Senior Director and Head of Chef Products, Progress

TEST AUTOMATION

Now that test automation is becoming very broadly adopted and security scanning and DevSecOps is well on the way, the focus is shifting to the remaining areas that still have the potential to impact code (including infrastructure as code) as it heads to production. New areas include the automated use of sophisticated and auditable governance and the security and automation of configuration data changes.
Anand Ahire
Senior Director, Product Management, DevOps, ServiceNow

Automated testing needs to work on a business process level, across application boundaries because it is an integral part of any DevOps pipeline. The focus of test automation shifts from automatic execution of tests, and toward automation of test environment management, automation of test authoring, and automation of the analysis of test results. The combination of exploratory testing and continuous automation will continue to gain steam in 2022, while traditional plan-driven testing with a formal user acceptance stage will continue to diminish in practice. Application testers need to learn to work with APIs in addition to testing through the user interface. Both automated testing and telemetry will be used to shift testing both left and right at the same time.
Esko Hannula
VP of Product Line Management, Copado

AI/ML AND TESTING

In software engineering the next evolution is to use ML in the development pipeline to cut the testing bottleneck and give developers the right signal earlier.
Harpreet Singh
Co-CEO & Co-Founder, Launchable

HIGH VELOCITY TEST SIGNALS

We, in the DevOps community, are going to see a continued expansion in high velocity test signals that need to be integrated into the SDLC to ensure confidence in customer experience. Quality is directly connected to business growth.
Matt Wyman
Chief Product Officer, Sauce Labs

TESTING IN PRODUCTION

In a world where exact production circumstances matter ever more for stability and security, testing in pre-production is increasingly meaningless. That's why I predict that testing will become a production-time activity 2022. Consequently, the ability to test in production—as well as to control the fallout from such tests — will become essential.
Tobias Kunze
CEO and Co-Founder, Glasnostic:

ACCESSIBILITY TESTING

Recent research shows that the pandemic has had a significant positive impact on digital accessibility awareness as organizations were forced to think digital-first. Mature DevOps organizations are automating accessibility testing with a rate of efficiency and velocity never seen before. This trend will accelerate further as Dev Teams get better at advocating for people with disabilities and obtain proportionate resources and funding needed to include accessibility testing in their existing testing practices."
Dylan Barrrell
CTO, Deque Systems

Whether driven by fear of litigation or by the promise of increasing audience (and revenue), 2022 will see software companies increasing their investment in making their products accessible. Studies show that companies lose billions in revenue to competitors with more accessible websites, and this number will only grow — unless companies invest in better tooling and more widespread adoption.
Marcus Merrell
Senior Director of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs

Go to: 2022 Kubernetes Predictions