Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
2022 Trends in Testing – The Ecosystem of DevOps
By Matt Wyman, Chief Customer Officer, Sauce Labs and Marcus Merrell, Vice President of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs
As we head into the new year, the ecosystem of devops tooling continues to evolve. As technologies continue to change the marketplace, advancements in quality, signal-driven testing and application programming interfaces (APIs) will have a growing impact on the software development and testing industry.
Over the last (almost) two years, there have been significant pandemic-fueled business model shifts and societal transformation that was previously unimaginable. Now, the digital quality required to support this motion will drive an increased adoption of DevOps across organizations. To achieve quality at speed, in 2022, there will be continued expansion in test signals that drive velocity in software delivery.
The concept of where and when test is executed will continue to change shape, including more complex ephemeral environments as well as deeper behavioral validation in production. Plus, the goals of testing continue to expand beyond code quality to include business outcomes, such as coverage, mean time to recovery (MTTR) and customer experience. In today’s environment, there is a direct connection between software quality – as measured by customer experience – and business growth. With that in mind, DevOps will only continue to gain momentum. Couple that with increased consumer demand, fueled in part by the pandemic, and we’ll continue to see the expansion of test signals that drive software velocity in the software development lifecycle (SDLC).
The ecosystem of DevOps tooling has become immense, overwhelming, and honestly quite unreasonable. Petabytes of data stream through every possible info source, and we’re left to sift through this madness with little-to-no assistance. Moving forward, developers and executives will demand clearer signal: deduplication, symbolication, indexing and the elimination of false positives. While this work has been underway for years, 2022 will be the breakthrough year that will prove not only the possibility, but that the market is mature enough to adopt it.
With an expanded commitment to deliver greater digital experiences and better products, faster, the responsibilities of DevOps teams are also charged with managing the lifecycle of their software applications well beyond the development stage. And with that responsibility, many developers are expanding their testing and monitoring toolkit, relying on technology solutions to empower and enable teams to receive quality signals throughout all stages of the SDLC.
As such, the tech solutions and platforms that empower this evolution must also keep pace to meet the needs of today’s DevOps teams, which need tools that are consistently considering security, boosting reliability, increasing efficiency and functionality, constantly upgrading scalability and enabling speed-to-market.
With this evolution, there will also be an increased adoption of process-wide quality processes, built into the DevOps tool chain. Where testing has traditionally been considered a cost center – and teams have been separated from the design and engineering parts of the cycle – the industry is now ready for an overhaul. “Test” is no longer about finding bugs in your software; it’s about identifying risk and adding value for the user. Further, “Test” is no longer a necessary bottleneck in the sprint toward delivery, it’s a vital piece of engineering, shrunk down from its traditional size, woven throughout the pipeline to deliver meaningful signal all the way.
In the API environment, developers will, more and more, be held accountable for what companies ship. As such test automation becomes even more critical to success and speed. As developers switch from focusing on systems of record to systems of engagement (e.g., mobile apps, web platforms, web services, etc.), they need cloud-based testing tools that are much better at things like scaling up/down for changing needs and aggregating global test data to create a single version of truth about frontend and backend quality. This makes for much more usable feedback loops and reporting.
Systems of engagement (and systems of innovation) are very much API-driven and architected with decoupled microservices that require development and ops teams to work independently on increasingly complex test cases. Much of the business logic, functional and end-to-end testing that once took days or weeks can now be done in seconds with API test automation and AI-driven testing.
Recognizing that APIs have become the backbone of modern apps and web platforms, technology providers, like Sauce Labs, have placed a heightened focus on building better API testing and monitoring solutions to help agile and devops teams accelerate debugging and remediation, shorten release cycles and deliver continuous quality-at-speed.
Ultimately, modern test automation allows developers to focus on making sure their builds don’t fall short of the user story. And DevSecOps leaders benefit from using modern (functional and end-to-end) test automation to make sure known and unknown vulnerabilities don’t go live.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Matt Wyman, Chief Customer Officer, Sauce Labs
With over 20 years of industry experience, Matt Wyman serves as Chief Customer Officer at Sauce Labs, the leading continuous testing cloud of web and mobile applications. In this role, Matt is focused on the customer experience through Product Management and Marketing, helping developers deliver business value, faster by making test more efficient – from browser and mobile functional testing to API, visual regression, mobile beta testing, low-code automation and production error monitoring.
Marcus Merrell, Vice President of Technology Strategy, Sauce Labs
Marcus Merrell is Vice President of Technology Strategy at Sauce Labs, where he uses experience from more than 20 years in test to manage strategic technical alliances. Marcus works with partners to build robust, customer-centric solutions around test automation, release management and the entire SDLC. He started using Selenium/WebDriver in 2007, contributes to the Selenium project and chairs the Selenium Conference Organizing Committee.
