Eggplant Blog

Everything about software has changed—how it’s architected, developed and produced, what it does, what users want from it, and how often they expect new features. To keep up, organisations are turning to continuous delivery and DevOps. Yet product teams still do a lot of manual testing, which consumes a lot of time they don’t have, thanks to shrinking test windows. Incorporating automation into your testing approach is a great strategy, but figuring out where and how to start isn’t necessarily quick and easy.

We recently co-hosted a webinar with Bloor Research about the Future of Testing, and in it, we conducted an informal poll about artificial intelligence (AI) and testing. When we asked what everyone thought the biggest advantage was to incorporating AI into a test automation strategy, attendees overwhelmingly selected team productivity and efficiency.

For a while now (about 10 years), Dev and Ops have been trying to get along. After all, collaboration between the two creates fast feedback loops and gets high-quality software into users’ hands faster. But with a new space emerging, digital experience management, Dev and Ops need to make a new BFF—the business—to stay in sync.

It’s not often you hear dev teams shouting from the rooftops about a relatively minor software release. (Actually, developers rarely shout in the first place, except when playing a lively game of foosball.) But we think this one is pretty cool.

We recently commissioned a study of 750 development team leaders in the UK and the U.S. to gauge the extent of the pressure today’s organizations are experiencing with respect to app development. On the same day that we announced our App Gap research results—revealing that almost half of businesses feel the pressure to launch often untested apps—we hosted the first in our series of our Digital Automation Intelligence Roadshows.

You can find 28 million apps on Google Play and 22 million in Apple’s App Store. Yet, nearly one in four people who download an app use it only once. Apps are incredibly slow under certain circumstances, don’t work in key parts of the workflow, and have less-than-optimal usability. The app scrap heap is growing because many organizations are still testing to ensure code quality, not a superior user experience (UX).

A new study of 600 testers reports that 91 percent of test teams are struggling to meet increased user expectations compared to 12 months ago, and 66 percent said that test automation needs to expand beyond just test execution to keep up with business demands. The new study, conducted by Kickstand across the U.S. and U.K. on behalf of Testplant, generally identified that app dev teams are feeling the pressure to innovate and deliver high-quality user experiences quickly.

If you’re in the software development and testing realm, you know how rapidly things have changed in a short amount of time. Digital business is here to stay and companies in all sectors are disrupting their business models and undergoing digital transformations to stay relevant. They’re turning to agile development approaches and DevOps to spark innovation and rapidly deliver new, cutting-edge products and solutions that meet evolving customer desires.

TestPlant CTO, Antony Edwards, was interviewed by Mobile World Live at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year. Antony talks about the key trends in mobile and IoT, and how testing needs to change in order to be more focused on UX.