(In this SmartBits, Shivaji Raju outlines ” Key trends in automation “. The video is at the end of this blog)

Key trends in automation are significant focus on services testing with the architecture changes coming in. With service-first approach and microservices , there is a lot of emphasis on testing the services. The other aspect is that traditionally we had a lot of test cases or automation scripts on the UI. That seems to be changing. We are trying to bring in quite a balance between different layers of testing rather than just focusing on UI.

The other trend is on the tools. We were predominantly using tools like HP UFT, Rational tools, or Selenium to some extent. The trend now is shifting towards script-less solutions like Tosca, Functionize, Mabl which has ability to build scripts faster. Some trends have been noticed on the framework front too. We traditionally had QA-driven approaches which were quite heavy. Now the shift is to use lightweight approaches or frameworks, especially in the Agile context and frameworks that integrate to the toolsets as part of the DevOps pipeline itself. The need is to ensure that the framework integrates with different build tools like Maven, JIRA or Artifactory. Those are some of the expectations when building a solution for the framework.

Again, DevOps is a significant trend now, so the expectation is to see how we could automate the continuous testing pipeline, considering that it’s not just about automating the execution piece, automate even test data or probably automate the infrastructure piece. So for provisioning infrastructure from the clouds, there are certain tools to do that and then there are trends around virtualizing services, even virtualizing databases also to ensure that some automation is brought into the data and the services layer and that is how we would achieve an end to end CI or CT automation.