Testing is no more about discovering problems in a program; it also helps testers take proactive steps to ensure that the functionality of the product is preserved during the testing cycle. Test automation trends in 2024 are focused on enhancing the testing methodologies and understanding the advancements of new technologies, like Artificial Intelligence, AI in testing.

A Market and Market report says that the global automation testing market is expected to grow from USD 24.7 billion in 2022 to USD 52.7 billion by 2027 at a CAGR of 16.4%. As a techie, you must be updated on all the latest trends in test automation to keep up with the changing landscape of testing.

Let’s understand the latest test automation trends in 2024 to ensure that your software is of the right quality, security, or compliance and remains scalable.

What Drives Changes in the Future of Software Testing Automation?

A business is constantly pushed to evolve with the times, in compliance with the conditions of the market. Let’s look into the factors which, according to preliminary assessments and surveys, would influence test automation in the future of software testing:

• Now, with agile and DevOps—ways of completing tasks quickly—the need for automated testing has grown even more paramount. Cloud computing allows numerous tests to be run in parallel, thereby reducing the time taken to fetch test results.
• Either way, considering the trend of popularizing the IoT, including mobile applications, automated testing helps ensure that everything will go smoothly.
• Automated testing tools can help swiftly test and validate these apps to guarantee their proper operation. AI and machine learning are technologies that allow for faster and more accurate testing.
• Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) require you to ensure that your code changes do not introduce new problems or disrupt current functionality. This requires you to incorporate testing into your development process, and it must be automated!
• Open-source automated testing solutions are gaining popularity because they are adaptable, inexpensive, and allow users to support each other.
• New computer languages, as well as frameworks, are being developed specifically for test automation, making it easier to build tests that will not fail later. 

Understanding Key Test Automation Trends 2024

Given the speed of new trends, keeping up with the future of software testing is quite very important. Let us now consider the following trends in test automation:

1. AI-driven QA Transformation

AI is changing automated testing through workflow improvement and enhancing efficiency and accuracy. Machine learning allows for effective test asset management, while analytical-based algorithms enable automatic test planning in test-driven Development. AI automation testing guarantees high coverage, low maintenance and upkeep, code scanning, refactoring possibilities, adherence to coding standards, and quicker resolution of code vulnerabilities.

2. Explainable AI in Testing

Explainable AI will be significant in 2024 and will build confidence and reliability in automated testing. Explainable AI is a set of tools that helps professionals understand the logic and reasoning behind giving a specific output.

Businesses are required to change to explainable AI automation testing to adapt to constantly changing regulatory conditions and increase consumer requests for more interpretability of the decisions and outputs made by AI-enabled solutions. This reinforces Explainable AI frameworks and technologies such as LIME, SHAP, and TensorFlow, which will foster increasing AI adoption. 

3. Self-Healing Tools

Self-healing tools enable testing teams to detect and fix problems before they even happen. These machine learning-based tools become more proficient at developing and maintaining robust tests when they run more tests because they learn from experience. These technologies will analyze and optimize millions of bits of information in the DevOps pipeline and help stakeholders make thoughtful decisions to optimize their testing pipelines for speed, simplicity, and intelligence.

4. Code Less Automation

Codeless automation technologies have democratized Quality Assurance (QA) by enabling professionals with varying coding skills to engage in test automation. This trend adds to a more durable and user-friendly product quality. The global low-code platform industry is anticipated to be worth around 65 billion US dollars by 2027. Codeless testing provides automated tests without the need for a single line of code, supporting teams of all skill levels.

5. Third-Party Integrations

Advanced connections with modern testing ecosystems give testers a unified picture of the quality lifecycle. These interfaces provide flexibility and access to tools at any time, allowing teams to collaborate seamlessly with the required test infrastructure, such as centralized databases, reporting portals, accessing-anywhere tools, and managed resources.

6. Advanced Test Data Management

Advanced data analytics, as well as synthetic data generation approaches, are transforming Test Data Management (TDM) by producing high-quality, diversified, and compliant test data. This is critical for conducting effective and realistic QA, maximizing test coverage, and discovering difficult test result trends.

7. Ethical & Bias Testing in AI

With the increased demand for AI in software, QA will be used to execute ethical testing of AI-driven decision-making processes. If trust and accountability are to be built, high importance should be placed on transparency and knowledge of AI-driven decisions, together with Explainable AI technologies. This falls in line with the heightened requirement for ethical considerations in AI.

8. Shift Left

Shift-left testing, or running automated tests ahead of schedule against code modifications in the software delivery lifecycle, will be the main emphasis of automation testing trends in 2024. CI/CD pipeline integration brings about early and more rapid error detection. A DevOps team will give shift-left testing priority for unit, integration, performance, or testing of any form.

9. Adapting to Quantum Computing

With the advent of quantum computing, QA could provide new challenges to keep the quantum nature and applications robust, even by 2024. Quantum Computing in automation testing means using AI models to identify patterns in the test results, like error patterns, platform failure patterns, and performance patterns. All these patterns highlight an application’s vulnerabilities, and they can also help solve the Oracle problem. The Oracle problem is software testing that involves distinguishing between the system’s correct and incorrect behavior.

Conclusion 

The future is going to unleash the potential of software testing and revolutionize it. Test automation trends in 2024 are leading toward a more efficient and dependable software development process. The future of test automation is an exciting one, promising not only increased efficiency and reliability, but also innovation and competitive edge. It’s time to accept these changes, to lead rather than simply follow, and to shape a future in which your software and business processes set new industry standards.

Are you ready for the next step in test automation? Let us work together for change. At Hyqoo, we are the talent cloud platform with a database of over 14 million worldwide talent. We will help you identify the best automation testing engineers who work in an agile software development methodology that is heavily focused on the creation of automated tests.