Lead Automation Engineer at Gov, Varun Sharma, unveils testing challenges he believes will occur in coming years, as well as how to embrace and avoid certain testing practices

According to Sharma, testing offline and service worker applications from end-user journey perspectives can be tricky to handle, especially if you use a non-JVM based test framework.

With the concept of frontend and backend merging in future, there has to be a carefully balanced decision on which automation test stack to use, based on team dynamics i.e. JVM or java-script based frameworks.

With the global concern around customer data and GDPR regulations, security and vulnerability testing appear to be a key part of the continuous delivery to check open source artefacts prior to use in implementation and production code itself.

Embrace testing practices

So, why not start embracing these practices? Sharma recommends the following:

• Start using the Google Lighthouse score in CI for your user-facing app to measure your scorecard based on the cumulation of load time, flaky connection, accessibility, SEO audits.
• Start automatic testing on early browser shadow releases and catch early issues before the latest browser auto-update breaks your end user.
• Check out new environmental health check/heartbeat monitors.
• Use dynamically auto-generation of test data for testing using container technologies to create test infrastructure.

Avoid testing challenges

According to Sharma, you should also avoid the following:

• Avoid using test reporting monolithic products, instead, try similar open source frameworks like serenity to not only showcase business-friendly test automation reports, but also comparative tests stability reports using custom CI plugins like the test analyser report.
• It is a growing anti-pattern of having the tests in multiple places for manual and BDD automated tests, instead, we can use the common way of having all tests in BDD and tag as appropriate i.e. @manual etc.
• Since the focus should be on delivering faster, the end user journey scenarios should sit at top of test pyramid and should be least. We must have appropriate alignment with tests pyramid with most of the tests at unit test level followed by integration test.

Written by Leah Alger