Today, software applications need to deliver a consistent and reliable experience across multiple browsers, operating systems, and devices. To accomplish this, companies are spending valuable resources and time manually deploying dedicated test infrastructures. This translates into a limited availability of test scenarios and prevents companies from generating enough test coverage to ensure the best user experience across the most commonly used platforms.

SmartBear recently released its State of Software Quality | Code Review 2021 report. The report highlights the industry trends and findings based off a survey of close to 800 respondents from the coding industry. While many interesting discoveries were shared, we’ve narrowed down and examined the top ten insights from the 2021 report.

“Let’s get to the point” is something we’d all love to say in certain situations. The talkative restaurant server. The aunt who tells the same story over and over. The cooking blog that tells the author’s entire life story before the recipe. These people love to talk but they can’t read the room. They make the listener/reader work extra hard to understand the point, like finding a needle in a haystack.

Test Automation is a necessary precondition for high-quality modern development. Testing and test automation must be integrated into the software delivery processes to give the team the right level of feedback, at the right time, and to ensure high-quality software. One of the biggest challenges of building a test automation framework that works on a long-term, scalable basis, is that it requires fundamentally different conditions compared to a predominantly manual testing approach.

Automated visual regression testing tools check for style issues and problems with the visual layer of an app or website. The benefit of these tools is that they can catch issues on the visual layer (the user interface of the website or app, which customers see) that may get missed by test scripts that only interact with the underlying code (the DOM).

For those not familiar with the acronym MTTR, ‘Mean Time to Recovery’, is the average time your organization takes to bounce back from a product or system failure. All DevOps stakeholders want this number to be low, as it is a good proxy for your organization’s ability to understand and improve its overall processes. Also, low MTTR scores are strongly correlated with customer satisfaction ratings! But we aren’t talking about DevOps metrics today.