5 software development trends propel innovation in 2019

Software testers always have to adjust to new IT industry challenges and software development trends. In 2019, expect the big challenge to be shift-right testing.

Agile and DevOps methodologies push QA professionals to accelerate the test process, while championing the quality user experience (UX) that customers demand.

Many software testing and development trends center around the integration of effective, yet streamlined processes that increase both code velocity and quality. As a community of practice, we have made great progress, especially in the implementation of continuous testing.

However, there's a final frontier that dev and test professionals are still hesitant to enter: shift-right testing, otherwise known as testing in production. While shift-right testing is considered a high-risk venture, it is a way to mitigate the risk involved with continuous deployment. Carefully designed risk-based testing might catch critical bugs before production, but you can never eliminate them all.

In 2019, enterprises will demand that testers embrace shift-right testing -- extending QA into production -- and include it in their test strategies. This change in technique can include canary releases, A/B testing and even fault tolerance testing, a type of Destructive testing. Testers can apply nearly all test types to software in production, including nonfunctional, functional and UX tests.

As enterprises embrace the benefits of risk-based, shift-right testing as a mainstream app dev trend, expect full traceability between requirements and test cases, as well as the traditional traceability matrix, to drop from the strategies of all but health- and safety-critical organizations. The focus must be to use innovations, such as AI, to improve risk analysis techniques, rather than to plan for and document full test coverage.

Gerie Owen is a QA evangelist at QualiTest Group and a certified ScrumMaster.