While test stability and test coverage are still challenging for teams, the top performers are the ones who are embracing continuous testing. 

This is according to the annual State of Test Automation survey, in which Perfecto surveyed over 400 leading digital enterprises across industries. 

Organizations are finding it difficult to keep up with high-value test suites as modern apps and the market continuously change. 

To address these concerns, these companies should leverage market data in order to align their testing lab with customer usage data and continuously maintain, validate, and modify test automation suites, according to the survey. 

Test automation executions throughout the pipeline should be spread based on software iteration scope, regression needs, parallel testing for velocity, and more, Perfecto explained. 

The survey also found that in 2022, organizations are looking to expand shift-left testing to API, performance, and accessibility testing. This comes as test failure analysis joined manual testing as an especially tedious part of the software testing life cycle this year. 

“According to Perfecto’s data, no more than 4% of failures end up being actual defects. Yet defects are the most important failures to analyze when looking through testing reports. Organizations that do not have coordinated reporting methods end up spending more time than necessary on backlog looking at the other reasons why tests fail,” the report stated. 

Shift-left testing can help because it is more cost-effective to reveal defects earlier and the method supports the goals of Agile/DevOps and makes it easier to maintain code and quality. 

“AI/ML will also continue to play a role in optimizing test failure analysis and improving other areas of testing. Intelligent test automation is still a major area of interest in 2022 and will continue to play an important role in testing moving forward,” the survey also stated.