We received an interesting article last week from a friend about Technology Trends.
The 10 Best Tech Products of the 2010s were listed. It was surprising how old some of them were. Some technology has been around a lot longer than was remembered!
Of course, the 10 best had to be followed up with the worst failures. Only 5 of those, but they still resonate for the amount of money sunk into them and the scale of the failure in some cases.
The next section was a prediction of the Five technologies for the next decade. A decade seems like a long time for some of these. We expect them to be mainstream within a year or two in some cases. Some are used already.
They are:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI)
- Blockchain
- Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR)
- Big Data
- Internet of Things (IoT)
So what is the impact on Software Testing? Some of these will be a huge challenge for those who are used to dealing with static inputs and static results. Most of these technologies will not work on that principle. The Test Environment will have to change also. We have already had test environments change in the last few years to accomodate many external feeds and applications. Now the test environment will have to expand further in order to accomodate inputs we don’t use now and also the volumes of data needed for the testing.
So what is the impact on Quality Assurance (Process Improvement)? There may be an even bigger impact on how we work. In the past, we could retrieve some mistakes by adding items late in the process. That will no longer be possible with some of the technologies. Failure to consider all items at the beginning of a project could have much larger costs later on. We cannot afford that type of omission in 2020 and beyond.
Photo by Alex Kotliarskyi on Unsplash