Changes to Test Auto. due to COVID/Economy

I’m curious how the COVID/economic downturn is impacting your software quality teams.

For instance, is it causing any change in the amount of test automation you are doing? Have release schedules relaxed or compressed? Is it shifting who (which role) does testing? Are tools replacing people or visa-versa? How is it affecting the budget?

I’m in a very unusual position.

  1. My work is all about remote-working products, so stance and reliance on automation is unchanged.
  2. Some of the automation tooling does not support exploratory testing over the VPN very well, so yeah, it’s having an impact, but it has triggered some innovation.
  3. Yes, the developers do have to do more testing, but to be honest, I have been also pushing them to resurrect more unit testing and polish that side of things.
  4. Budget, we still have some cash we need to spend, and going forward I want to increase the automation testing hardware, because we will soon have a huge new feature in pipeline to add unique testing for. So yes, struggling to decide where to spend but the budget has not changed.
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This is good and trending topic. I would like to iterate that which industry has been badly hit by COVID-19 pandemic. As of now, hotel, airline and tourism industries has been badly hit. Amid lock-down, it has impacted travel (public/private) industry as well.
Now coming to your question, if the application belongs to one of these industry then you may need to think about the future perspective.

Further, we have opportunity in different sectors like healthcare, farming sector, telecom, media and other essential products. Every industry is dependent on software these days. Software development companies are ready to work on innovative tool to help the work in the pandemic situation, so the functional testing services companies are planning to work on new domains and planning to automate the applications.

Now, since there will be slow down in lot of industries which eventually will effect the software industry as well. It may happen that cost will be reduced. Since, many companies do have plan to release application for an year and so, those will be continue working hence their QA team (Manual/Automation) will be working on it using existing tools. We hope that we will come out of it soon.

Hope this information is helpful for you.

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Telecoms. COVID-19 is allowing me to introduce automation at a faster rate… In my bedroom/office, flat out with project work. It’s mostly manual testing but the two hours thirty minutes saved in commuting is used up adding screens into the framework I’ve developed (currently Java/Selenium/Cucumber, but joining it to APIs for making calls, sending SMS/USSD messages and so on). Add that to the eight-ten miles walking goal per day (with a camera, if the light is good), and life is rather full. Also looking forward to some quality time on Pluralsight.

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Jason, …that is a lot of walking goal to make up for the loss in commuter walking.

But concur, anyone in communications is finding themselves overloaded with work right now. I am starting to hoard equipment to support manual testing in my dining room which has become my office. I am however trying to virtualize and “put” apps into Docker containers. Docker kind of hides some interactions, but still makes a lot of good testing possible because it becomes more maintainable.