The Great Resignation: The Impact of Lack of Skilled Testing Resources

Table of Contents

Test Automation – Overview

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Automation are game-changing technologies that will transform the testing world over the next decade. These technological trends have become even more important with the COVID-19 pandemic changing the tech-driven landscape in a manner never imagined. 

With the global pandemic changing workforce dynamics, the reliance on cutting-edge software, web, and mobile applications has grown substantially. To support this ever-growing demand, businesses turned to technology increasing the need to release fully functional, feature-rich, and flawless products and software to their end-users. As a result, in came test automation bringing the promise of extensive test coverage, scientific test accuracy, streamlined testing operations, lower cost, and increased resource efficiency.

Due to various factors, employees began queuing up at the exit door in record-breaking numbers, now coined the “Great Resignation,” causing major disruptions across all industries. This further increased the reliance on remote interactions and fully functional applications. And, with resources now spread thin, businesses and software development firms no longer have to pioneer these shifts alone due to the complimentary development of test automation technology and solutions.

The test automation market in 2021 was valued at 15 billion USD and is projected to grow 16% per year to 40 billion USD by 2027. The adoption of advanced testing methods such as DevOps and Agile methodologies continue to contribute to this growth.

Challenges for Management

The Great Resignation presents particular challenges for people who manage developers and QA teams. These market conditions have driven an acceleration in the use of AI and machine learning to combat the ongoing shortage of testing resources. 

The momentum for test automation is being driven by necessity, as many enterprises find it challenging to operate under the current conditions. Therefore, it now makes sense for companies to make the required capital investments and build the infrastructure to support more automated testing solutions. This is required to ensure that their products and services remain bug-free and cater to rapidly-evolving customer demands.

Test Automation and the Great Resignation

As “quality at speed” has become a crucial business requirement, testing and quality assurance have also become a necessary area of focus. However, given the scenario that companies are in at present, the biggest challenge is managing resources effectively.  With evolving business scenarios and the need to push product lines in quick succession, the software development life cycle (SDLC) time frame has also shrunk. This newfound speed in development poses a major challenge when considering the of lack of resources.

The need of the hour is to have a strategic approach towards testing where less is more. For an organization to be truly agile, they need to focus on flexibility, fast response times, and rich reporting. Testing automation is a boon in this regard as it enables organizations to build and execute tests at scale with minimum latency. This frees up resources allowing them to use their expertise on more important things like research and development, new product ideation, and much more. Certain daily requirements that used to take a large amount of effort are now simple and easy to complete much faster.

For projects that require rapid release cycles, it is a time-intensive process to create test environments, allocate resources, and figure out the testing scripts and other mechanics to keep pace with development. To add to the problem, existing tools for testing require testers to embark on a steep learning curve. Conversely, the very purpose of automation is to lessen the burden on testers and shorten the testing phase of the development cycle. Also, less code means less complexity which ultimately translates into lower storage and maintenance costs. Practitioners have for long championed the idea of high quality and accurate testing with little to no code involved, thus paving the way for “codeless automation.”

Codeless Testing — The Testing Trend That Changes Everything

The Great Resignation has made organizations and especially the testing industry realize the true potential of codeless testing. The idea of codeless automated testing is to abstract the test creation and execution process through an intuitive UI coupled with a form-fill methodology thereby eliminating the need for time-intensive coding requirements for testers and developers.

The codeless approach enables broader participation in the testing process from developers and business analysts. Some of the tactical benefits of codeless testing include:

Early collaboration
Modular design
Faster test building
Reduced test execution times
Increased test coverage
Flexible maintenance
Resilient regression testing
Great reusability

The broader goals are faster delivery of quality software that enhances customer experience, increases revenue, and reduces cost, all achieved with minimum human intervention.

At the same time, the codeless platform must provide the flexibility of embedding code where the tester has a more efficient solution, an edge case, or chooses express specific creativity. The usefulness of codeless environments erodes if they cannot handle complexity, cross-platform processes, omnichannel requirements, easy integrations to CI/CD processes, or scaling test infrastructure.

Using the right product and process, testers, developers, and business analysts can push efficiencies beyond the traditional scripting and maintenance activities. DevOps is still a challenge for many organizations, and often the inefficiencies in the pipeline lead back to test coding, flakiness, and/or script maintenance challenges. Reducing time spent on repetitive tasks and abstracting the current coding practice frees up time that is better spent automating end-to-end processes.

The codeless model extends well beyond record and replay and taxonomy-driven automation. Self-healing tests to address flakiness are part of the codeless model. Natural language voice and text interfaces are the latest innovation that are transforming test scripting into a conversation. Using these approaches, the timeline to design, script, and execute has been reduced. And the effort required to maintain functional tests and add layers of performance and exploratory testing also has significantly declined. What used to take days and hours can now be completed in minutes and seconds. Furthermore, because the testing participants and reusability have increased, code coverage and test coverage have also expanded. 

As per Forbes, investments in automation have grown by 26%. Let’s learn how Qyrus, a simple, smart, scalable robust, and resilient test automation platform can help you do more with less in these trying times of the Great Resignation.

Augment The Capability of Your Testing Teams with Qyrus

Enable your teams to respond to these unprecedented challenges with Qyrus, the most powerful low-code/no-code test automation platform. 

Build and deliver higher-quality applications faster and more efficiently while saving time and money and increasing speed to market. Optimize application functionality and user experience by utilizing codeless and efficient test building, automation and infrastructure, and AI/ML capabilities. Qyrus can be your go-to test automation partner, and here is why:

Effectively fill the skilled resource gaps and enable today’s QA professionals for tomorrow’s opportunities and challenges 
Quickly release products, web, and mobile applications faster to the market than your competitors
Consistently deliver seamless and comprehensive customer experiences 
Optimize cost and resource efficiency at all times with reusable automated tests
Automate repeatable tasks, leaving more resources for R&D

How Can Qyrus Help You Address Your Testing Bottlenecks?

We have established that Qyrus should be your go-to test automation framework that can help you stay intact and navigate the Great Resignation with ease.

To summarize our Great Resignation series of blogs, Qyrus helps enterprises with a cloud-enabled, low-code/no-code test automation platform that is backed by exceptional AI/ML capabilities. Less time to market, great customer experience, cost, and resource efficiency, driving research, innovation, and bridging skilled resource gaps are some of the precise benefits that differentiate Qyrus from its counterparts.

We hope you have enjoyed our Great Resignation series. We look forward to hearing/reading your thoughts and perspectives. Utilize the power of Qyrus automation testing and face the Great Resignation head on!

Authors