Tasseomancy - Or "Reading those tea leaves"

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I wrote this primarily because I came across a new word! I liked the fact that the word didn't give any indication of what it might mean; and then sat down and did a bit of the same. A way of applying what you have learnt? :-) So here goes.

Given the Indian penchant for ‘Chai’, let’s do a bit of tasseomancy and gaze into those tea leaves for a bit of an understanding of where we at Last Mile believe that the testing industry will be moving towards.

Let’s get some of the obvious out of the way first. From a process perspective, speed to market and early, judicious automation will rule; DevOps will be the new Agile; Testers will need to get closer to the development, and automate upfront (we don’t like the term, but progressive automation, will be the flavour of the season).

From a technology perspective, mobile and to some extent, mobile test automation, will rule. But our bigger bet is on API testing beginning to take center stage. Gone will be the days when we automate screen based workflows, and seek stability in the code before we automate. Whilst the world uses analytics to predict customer usage patterns, we also believe that mining customer feedback can deliver us patterns to focus tests on.

Whilst a lot has been said about the testing around Internet Of Everything (which is where we believe a lot of interoperability issues will need to be focused on), a lot less is said about the “intelligence” that prediction mechanisms around us will gain, in the Robotic Process Automation world, “bot” world, the IoE world or even the Analytics world. So how do we test something where the answer is not necessarily right, and not necessarily wrong? How do we get the algorithm to learn a trend through heuristic data and then try to challenge the behaviour of the software. Here is where we believe, the skills of a tester as ‘fuzzy’ tester will be, er, tested.

So get set for the merry ride that is 2017.