Over the last four years, The European Software Testing Awards has grown to become the global recognition platform for the software testing and QA community. To further strengthen that position and to ensure valued and insightful learning is derived from the Awards programme, 2016 will see the launch of The European Software Testing Summit.

The Summit will see up to 16 of The European Software Testing Awards judging panel come together to present, discuss, and share their findings on industry trends, past and present, and what they mean to the wider community. These trends will have been identified from 4 years’ worth of project-based entries into The European Software Testing Awards. The findings will also be pulled together and presented in The European Software Testing Summit Report.

Best Use of Technology in Testing Projects Chapter

A sneak preview of the Best Use of Technology in Testing Projects Chapter is shared below:

This chapter is designed to highlight the trends in the Best Use of Technology in a Testing Project category. As the software industry now matures the usage of agile and DevOps to deliver projects and releases for their internal and external clients, testing organisations have also adapted their practices to imbibe technology to deliver testing and rely less on manual testing practices.

The challenge for testers across all industries is how using technology they can efficiently collaborate with analysts and developers to plan, prepare and test during the ‘build’ stage and effectively make the ‘test’ stage redundant.

Technology is being used to reduce testing costs by testing as soon as ‘testable’ features or components are ready. TDD and BDD principles for feature testing and using tools to automate regression testing using APIs rather than GUIs are truly coming to play. Testers are overcoming a learning curve and finding new roles such as developer in test.

The entries for this year’s European Software Testing Awards clearly show this thinking.

Most of the entries focused on key technology trends in their projects including:

• Automation at unit and API layer and less reliance on old style GUI based automation, using open source test automation tools such as Selenium and SoapUI.
• BDD (behaviour driven development) and specification by example – more popular testing techniques for functional testing particularly using Python as test automation language.
• Use of virtualised test environments and reducing footprint of multiple physical test environments, particularly testing on public cloud based platforms such as Amazon’s AWS, Google’s Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure.
• Usage of data injection stubs to simulate an integrated enterprise wide environment for end‑to‑end system integration testing.
• Agile testing – integrating testing with DevOps/continuous integration tools like TeamCity/Jenkins so that testing is performed often and at each build and is a seamless process. Reduce the handshake between developers and testers to make the end‑to‑end process more agile and transition the traditional tester’s role to be a developer in test role.
• Automated regression test suites to test on cross browser (IE/Firefox/Safari/Chrome) and cross platform (Windows/Mac/iOS/Android).
• Continuous performance testing – performance testing is not a test phase anymore performed after completion of functional and regression testing but is more adapted as an ‘experimental’ style tweaking various parameters (functional or technical) and reporting the performance (load/volume/stress) impacts to stakeholders on a more frequent basis.
• Focus on application security over web and mobile and making SAST (static application security testing), DAST (dynamic application security testing) and penetration testing part of the BAU testing process.
• Testing of internet of things platforms which require new thought leadership, testing tools and testing strategy.

The European Software Testing Summit

The full chapter, along with more insights from different Awards categories, will be available in The European Software Testing Summit Report, which will be distributed at The European Software Testing Summit.

The European Software Testing Summit is a one-day event that will take place on 16^th November in central London. To find out more information and register please click here.

Written by Cecilia Rehn.