Key Findings & Highlights:

The quality engineering (QE) market, also called software testing or quality assurance, is going through an extended growth cycle focused on continuous testing (i.e., testing under agile methodologies, using DevOps tools, and deploying automation). This cycle has been going for five years and still has significant growth potential: spending continues to grow in mid- to high-single digits.

In parallel with solid spending, QE vendors continue to invest in their continuous testing ‘platforms,’ driving automation beyond functional to support services (such as test environment and test data management) and non-functional testing.

AI is playing an increasing role, initially using analytics to conduct more selective and informed testing, driving productivity up. We think QE is on the verge of disruption with the pending introduction of AI-based automation to generate test scripts automatically. AI-based automation, combined with BDD and once-promising technologies such as model-based testing, will break up the effort-consulting requirements-test cases-test scripts cycle.

Finally, quality engineering is increasingly becoming very technical across existing and new areas (such as API testing and chaos engineering). This increasing technicality is driving major workforce reskilling investment in the context of talent shortage.