Innovation in the testing space continues its relentless journey. Testing has to keep up with the fast pace of innovation in the way we build and deploy modern applications. Fifty-four percent of overall enterprises are adopting agile/DevOps, while 78% of high-performing organizations are, too. Agile/DevOps makes a difference in your business performance. Enterprises are trying to leverage everything they’ve learned in the custom application development world with agile/DevOps and continuous testing and trying to apply it over in the appdev and testing teams that install, configure, customize, and change enterprise SaaS business packages (e.g., SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Workday, etc.). That requires adapting and using new DevOps and continuous testing capabilities, tools, and practices. In addition, the increasing pace of 1) cloud platform adoption, 2) multichannel consumption of enterprise software applications, and 3) maturing AI technologies puts rocket boosters on the pace expected of the testing market. These trends were the guiding North Star for The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Automation Testing Platforms, Q4 2022.
Test Automation Converges In Collaborative Platforms With Lots Of Intelligence
This year’s Wave evaluation focused on platform integration and AI, with strong attention to collaboration and effective and consistent test experience. Gone are the days of best-of-breed testing tools, as 72% of our 52 reference customers of the previous version of the Wave in 2020 claimed. Enterprises prefer an integrated testing platform approach over best-of-breed tools that address different types of testing. Clients recognize that testing takes a village, and enterprises need a consistent and high-usability testing environment that fosters collaboration among the business, technical testers and test engineers, and developers and product owners. In addition, the inhabitants of this village are not just humans anymore but also tester TuringBots. Tester TuringBots are AI-fueled bots with natural language processing, image recognition and vision capabilities, machine learning, and reinforcement learning that can help optimize all testing phases, automate smarter, and self-heal tests.
Everyone Wins, But Few Lead
In our 26-criterion evaluation, we identified the 15 most significant vendors. These are AccelQ, Applitools, Copado, Digital.ai, IBM, Idera, Keysight Technologies (Eggplant), Leapwork, Micro Focus, Parasoft, Perforce Software, Sauce Labs, SmartBear Software, Tricentis, and UiPath. As you can see, there are some newcomers such as Applitools, Copado, Leapwork, and UiPath. But you’ll also find some missing participants from previous Wave evaluations that did not make the cut this time. The testing market is mature but at the same time incredibly dynamic, with new players popping up every week, putting pressure on the more traditional ones to innovate faster. Those who don’t keep pace will struggle to provide a differentiated offering and maintain growth. The evaluation criteria selected also change dynamically from Wave to Wave to reflect the evolution of differentiating tool capabilities and changing customer needs. In the 26 criteria, besides the reference to the above trends, you’ll also find how vendors address types of automation capabilities, leveraging UI-, API-, or scripting-led testing and rich authoring environments with model-driven, keyword-driven, behavior-driven development and/or scripting/coding; test management and experience; integration with continuous integration/continuous delivery; shift-left performance; SaaS app testing; analytics and insights reporting; and more. This year’s Leaders are Parasoft, Micro Focus, Keysight Technologies (Eggplant), AccelQ, and Tricentis, which all pressed the pedal in the past 18 months on some of the expected innovation with AI, got great custom reference scores, and were above average on many of the criteria. Read more by downloading the report.
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