As a CEO of a testing company, a question that plays on my mind constantly is ‘what is the future of Testing?’ In the early 2000s, Ron Radice spoke at a QAI conference in India, where he had predicted that testing will die. His call was that automatic code generators will do the job so efficiently that testing will become obsolete. When he looked at the crystal ball then, he could see that prevention will be the creed and not detection.

Well, when I look at 2020, I believe Ron was right as well as wrong. Yes, code generators are arriving. Yes, there will be automated test case generators. Yes, model based testing will replace rudimentary testing activities. But, the whole boom of software especially in ubiquitous mobile devices means only more testing.

If the future includes automated cars like the Google driverless cars, I cannot imagine such a car with a technology that has not been fully and manually validated. If the future is the “Internet of Things”, I can only imagine that the amount of embedded testing will only explode. If the future is, business operations being handled through apps and app stores that have millions of applications pervading every step of our business and personal life then imagine the amount of mobile testing that will be required. If not anything, as everything gets more interconnected, the consequences of a critical failure will only be catastrophic. Wherever the nexus of cloud, social, mobile and big data takes us, I am thoroughly convinced that the need for testing will only grow.

While there a dime a dozen predictions on how things will look in 2020, my two bits around where testing will find itself as follows:

• Huge business opportunities arising from testing for app stores directly than app manufactures

• Test automation would have evolved from script less automation to automatic test case generators and execution

• The pressure to deploy rapidly in the Mobility and embedded devices space will mean that test automation tools will evolve to provide near and real time support to these areas

• Testing and testers will evolve to become super specialized with domain testers at one end and niche technical testers at the other end.

These are some things that come to mind and as the decade continues to evolve. Would be great to know what the rest of the testing world thinks.

Krishna Iyer|CEO|Zen Test Labs