Software Testing: The whole new world of opportunities for testers

Author: Darshan Thakkar

Testing methodologies are as old as the IT industry. In the earlier days, the developers themselves were testing their developed solutions and software on their own. As the technology started evolving and growing, the world of testing started evolving on a better pace. Almost for a decade the testing and quality assurance department has come into the existence. The evolution and inventions in the IT industry and technology have emerged the whole new world for testing.

In incredibly short period of time the testing industry has changed. There are so many new devices got introduced such as wearable, Smartphone, tablets and more? Moreover, each device might have different working model and methodology as well as the operating system. For instance, the Smartphone can have operating system such as android, iOS, Blackberry, Symbian, etc. These invented different testing approaches for ensuring the quality. The embedded testing is one of the testing models introduced for testing of the mobile devices.

The web world is embraced with so many different web development and design technologies such as.Net, PHP, Node.Js, Bootstrap, Joomla, Drupal, etc. All these technologies offer different types of functionalities and introduce different functions, features and coding approaches. Thus, the testing engineers need to fasten their belts to understand the different development technologies. The software testing has taken a more strategic approach.

Today's users have been very much selective. Moreover, the users don't have much time and patience. This has introduced the concept of performance testing. The software testing services department needs to ensure that the website has reduced load time; the software performance is up to the user expectation.

The IT companies have introduced more advanced models of software delivery and infrastructure. Many IT companies have adopted the agile delivery model, which includes Kanban, Extreme programming and Scrum. Thus, the testers need to embrace the best practices for delivering the bug free software speedily. There are many companies which offer the SAAS (Software as a Service) by moving into DevOps, constant integration, development and delivery. These require the automation testing skills to ensure the performance and required pace.

The technology has started moving from our palms to the cloud. The users have started storing their data over cloud so they can access it from anywhere, at any time. This has created many security concerns. As a testing engineer the testers need to ensure to check all the possible security threats and enforce the highest level of security on the cloud software and solutions.

The users are accessing the same software and applications from different devices. The websites can be explored from the desktop and also from a Smartphone. Thus, it is necessary as a software tester that one ensures the quality and uniformity on each device. Moreover, the different devices have different resolutions. Thus, the testing engineers need to make sure that the app, web or solution gives the same performance and experience to the user on any device.