Dr Armin Metzger has over 25 years of experience in software development and testing in industry and research projects and international committees. He has been the Managing Director of the German Testing Board e.V. (GTB) since 2018.
What challenges will software testing have to face in the future?
We have always been used to changes in technological platforms. We will cope well with this if we stay on the ball. I see greater challenges in the increasing dependence on software and its penetration into our everyday lives. This shifts the priorities of the quality features to be tested. Just think of usability and IT security, which still often receive too little attention. In addition, as a result of the agile transformation, testing is increasingly changing from an independent and autonomous function with its own organisational units to an integral task of the development teams.
What ideas or solutions could address these challenges?
Of course, with technological developments, testing methods will also improve and new techniques will emerge. But above all, against the background of the aforementioned challenges, we must strengthen the awareness of quality as a key factor for project and product success and thus the acceptance and management support for testing. And, of course, we must ensure that the expertise required for professional and systematic testing is also fully available in the organization and adequately distributed in terms of personnel to match the respective process model.
What does Future Testing look like? How will we test?
We are developing for increasingly networked and volatile application environments. The systems will therefore also have to adapt increasingly independently to the volatile environment. The static and deterministic test scenario in the laboratory will be less and less suitable for this. Concepts such as simulation or product certification, which have so far been used on the margins or only in certain industries, are starting points for possible (additional) solution approaches, and quality assurance must shift all the way to the production environment. Non-functional quality features such as IT security will gain in importance and ethical issues must also be considered.
How can testers and test managers prepare for this today?
The measures result from the challenges. The task is to continuously further establish testing as a prerequisite for project success in the agile teams and in management. Marketing for testing itself. And it is important, especially in the agile teams, to strengthen and improve the skills required for this, or even to build them up in the first place. Acceptance, budgets and skills have tended to deteriorate in recent years, as the Software Test Survey 2020 and the World Quality Report 2020-21, among others, show. Build a strong culture of a quality assurance community. And train teams along the change in technical and process requirements. Not entirely altruistically, I would of course like to refer here to the globally established standard scheme for training on testing, the ISTQB Certified Tester.