Testing Trends Wellington – A Great Start to an Ongoing Initiative

Sometimes life is a little bit like an experimental recipe. Add in a great venue, some interesting people and a presenter with an engaging style and a lot of open questions and then all of a sudden something really cool is the outcome. And that is how our first Testing Trends Wellington breakfast event went.

Held at the historical Thistle Inn, we were stoked to have over 15 key Test Leaders across Wellington join in a collaborative session on their views of the current Testing Trends. Expertly presented by Pramod Gupta of MPI, there was a great flow of ideas, comments and observations – as well as good food 😊.

Pramod started the session with a great open question – “If you could automate one part of your job with zero limitations (i.e. imagine a future where technology has no constraints, no budget limits, no skills gaps, no tools limitations, what would it be and why?” A major brain teaser for 8am in the morning. Data Creation for testing was one immediate response, quickly followed by Procurement and HR Paperwork (lots of laughs over that one) and Environment Provisioning. That question really got conversation started and this continued through the event. The presentation from Pramod covered strategic transformation of QA roles and technologies, including:

· Cloud native testing environments.

· The rise of Hybrid Quality Assurance roles which combines skills and responsibilities from multiple domains within SDLC. A blend of manual + automation skills, QA+ Development roles like SDET, testing + DevOps and the business taking on more structured testing roles).

· Smart Test Orchestration. The intelligent management and automation of test execution within a software development pipeline, incorporating planning, selection, parallel execution, smart allocation of resources, reporting and automated fail-fast mechanisms to reduce time and cost.

· Hyperautomation. Going beyond traditional automation by integrating technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Business Process Management (BPM) to create end-to-end automated workflows.

Pramod challenged the Test Managers to consider what their world would look like in two years and beyond – not just testing – also the integration with business systems delivery. Some of the trends that will happen in future is:

· Talent on Tap – the rise of AI assistance (AI agents) embedded into work processes.

· Democratisation of testing – from the flow of testing left into developers and right into the business to the rise of browser plugin testing technologies (no expensive installs and security reviews).

· The FinOps approach to manage cloud costs for test environment management – identifying the unit cost of product and product features. Even to the scale of being able to evidence, measure and quantify the tradeoff between the increasing use of AI to gain productivity increases (automated requirements, test cases, test execution) and the potential rise in defects as a result of the use of AI.

The associated discussions were animated and interesting. Including the discussion on how we get AI to ‘own’ and fix the mistake (Self-healing tests) – much like a person led approach does today.

As a first up session of the Test Managers Testing Trends breakfast initiative created and supported by TTC Global, a great first event. And plenty to continue with in our next event in October.

Open to Test Managers, Test Practice Managers of internal organisational test teams, if you missed out on the session and are keen to be a part of future ones, please email shane.ross@ttcglobal.co.nz to be added to the invite list.