Two paradigms dominate the modern software testing landscape, shift left and shift right. These are fueled primarily by the need to accelerate software delivery to keep pace with a more dynamic and demanding digital engagement landscape. Shift left moves testing workloads earlier in the SDLC, leveraging test automation and practices like behavior-driven development (BDD) to foster developer accountability and more comprehensive testing.

Last week members of our service, network and sales teams gathered in Copenhagen to take in software testing best practices at the 2022 EuroSTAR software testing conference. On the ground, in our discussions, and during sessions we picked up on three key themes important to the future of our industry —

If your typical user story looks like: “As a new user, I want to create an account to have an account,” then you might have a problem. As a recent viral Twitter thread from user evangelist and UX pro Laura Klein pointed out a big issue in the QA community: how to write a user story. Product owners are trying to create and execute as many user stories as possible to define requirements and establish acceptance criteria.

While a lot of attention is being paid to cost controls in the context of current market trends, the pressure to reduce software testing costs is not something that changes with economic tides. The reality is that even in a bull market, development leaders — pushed by financial expectations and the costly nature of development — are not only being asked to deliver high-quality releases faster than ever, they’re being asked to tighten budgets.

If you feel that internal resources are running low relative to demand, you’re not alone. At the 2022 Women of Silicon Valley conference, speakers touched on the difficulty of acquiring and retaining resources, preparing teams for change, and optimizing software testing on a small budget. At the most basic level, the requirements of the software dev process, from designing, coding, and testing, are enormous.

Software dev and QA have a historically complicated relationship. Engineering teams are sprinting to keep up with the astronomical demand for high-quality software and meet target engineering KPIs. But QA delays releases and adds unexpected debugging assignments to already-busy sprint boards. In the words of one engineer from GitLab’s 2021 developer survey, “testing slows down everything.”

In part one of the “How to better incorporate QA into Agile teams” series, we’re diving into how to improve code development through Agile QA integration prior to feature or product release. The biggest problem for software development teams is getting work done under time constraints. 54% of development teams are struggling to keep up with software delivery. Product teams wanted it yesterday, and devs can’t deliver until tomorrow.

When it comes to introducing and scaling automated testing, QA teams can get quickly overwhelmed trying to figure out what processes to automate first, which tests stand to gain the most ROI, and how automation can work with manual testing strategies. Teams often look to general frameworks, like the test automation pyramid, to dive into building their automated testing strategy.