Key Predictions for Tech and Software Testing Trends in 2025

What’s next for software testing in 2025?

In this episode of Test Case Scenario, Jason Baum, Evelyn Coleman, and Marcus Merrell discuss the trends shaping the future of testing. From AI advancements to accessibility regulations, they explore what’s on the horizon for testing tools and methodologies.

The conversation covers everything from the ongoing shift left versus shift right debate to the growing importance of testing beyond QA, including security, onboarding, and customer experiences. You’ll also hear their predictions on how low-code tools, edge-case testing, and emerging technologies like quantum computing could impact the industry.

Join us as we discuss: 

(00:00) Introduction

(03:50) Emerging trends in software testing for 2025

(04:45) Testing beyond QA boundaries

(06:40) The rise of low-code tools and their impact on testing

(07:18) Prediction on quality emphasis in software testing

(09:03) AI advancements and challenges in real-world applications

(11:03) Risk reduction and change management trends for testing

(12:55) The state of shift left and its evolution in the industry

(14:57) Shifting right and testing in production scenarios

(17:13) The importance of context in choosing testing strategies

(20:39) Accessibility testing driven by new regulations

(21:45) Quantum computing in testing—hype or reality?

(22:32) Ethical AI testing and its scalability challenges

We’d love to hear from you! Share your thoughts in the comments below or at community-hub@saucelabs.com.

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Transcript

Jason Baum [00:00:00]:

This is Test Case Scenario with me, your host, Jason Baum. This podcast is the definitive hub for knowledge and stories in the software testing and development communities. If you're new to the channel, hit the subscribe button and let's dive straight into the episode. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Test Case Scenario. I am your host, Jason Baum, and with me, my fellow co-hosts Evelyn Coleman and Marcus Merrell. Welcome back to the show, guys.

Evelyn Coleman [00:00:41]:

Oh, I said howdy, and guess what I got today? Cowboy boots.

Jason Baum [00:00:46]:

All right, well, you know who else is, is feeling a little cowboy. Marcus is obviously not at home right now. Marcus, why don't you tell us where in the world is Marcus Merrell?

Marcus Merrell [00:00:59]:

I'm in a parking lot of a Lowe's in between San Antonio and Austin in a little town called New Braunfels, having just come from a customer meeting and now heading to my mom's house.

Jason Baum [00:01:09]:

Well, there you go. Cause why not? Why not a Lowe's in the middle of Texas?

Marcus Merrell [00:01:16]:

Central Texas.

Jason Baum [00:01:17]:

Central Texas. There you go. And just true to point, that Marcus will always be available for this show, which we always appreciate, mainly because he just loves showing up and talking about testing. You can't stop.

Marcus Merrell [00:01:29]:

That's right.

Jason Baum [00:01:29]:

Can't stop him.

Evelyn Coleman [00:01:30]:

There's a joke in here about Marcus being in his car and mobile testing, but I can't, I can't do a landing on it, so.

Jason Baum [00:01:37]:

Oh, it's. The concept is good. The concept is good. Maybe by the end we'll have workshopped a joke. Maybe ChatGPT could do it for us. Whatever it ends up being, the ChatGPT's response. This is not good to be good. Cool.

Jason Baum [00:01:55]:

As we come to the end of the year, beginning of a new year, as we're in the beginning of a new year, we always like to throw out the word, what trends, what's going to happen? What happened? Where are we about to face what might happen in 2025 that might shake the world that we're not expecting? Of course we're going to be wrong. Nine times out of ten, I'll preface this by saying whatever trends we might be bubbling up, sometimes those are wrong. But yet you might catch lightning in a bottle and nail something that's about to emerge. And wow, then we look so smart. So we figured we'd try, we try and nail a few bubbling emerging trends, maybe touch on some trends that are happening for real, like that we already know are happening, that you should know as well. And then, yeah, we're going to guess we're going to take our shot at guessing what some future state trends might take place in the year 2025. And I think the inspiration for this, in my head anyway is that old Conan segment in the year 2000. No, Evelyn, never seen it.

Jason Baum [00:03:11]:

Conan O'Brien. He's a late-night talk show host, very famous.

Evelyn Coleman [00:03:17]:

I think I've seen him parodied.

Jason Baum [00:03:19]:

Yeah, used to make his guests sit there. Carnac. No. Oh, no, that was the other guy.

Marcus Merrell [00:03:25]:

Anyway, that was Carson.

Jason Baum [00:03:27]:

Just kidding. All right. Anyway, we could talk about late-night television all day. Let's get in today's episode and. Yeah, let's just throw out some trends. I thought it would be cool if maybe, Evelyn, we took our shots at throwing out some trends that we were just like pulled out of thin air and see if what Marcus had to say about it.

Marcus Merrell [00:03:50]:

It's all right here. We mauled about dumb things. 

Evelyn Coleman [00:03:56]:

Okay, all right, I'll get, I got one. But it's contrary to what Marcus was saying right before we started recording. But the testing of everything. Testing in places that you haven't seen test before. I don't know. We've got DevOps the gray was on the other day. Nick, who said things about like DevOps and security.

Evelyn Coleman [00:04:17]:

So maybe just testing in parts of your business that are outside of the box of QA, like traditional QA, like your software, maybe testing your security stuff, testing your employee onboarding, Testing, all of it. That's my, that's my guess.

Marcus Merrell [00:04:37]:

I'm a fan. All right. I like it. I think more testing is always welcome, unless it's unnecessary and doesn't help your business.

Jason Baum [00:04:45]:

Evelyn, are you seeing that as trend?

Evelyn Coleman [00:04:47]:

I think we're just guessing.

Jason Baum [00:04:49]:

Well, yeah, but, you know, educationally guessing, like educationally guessing. Have a hunch.

Evelyn Coleman [00:04:57]:

Yes. I think that as testing has become more approachable with low code and citizen developers and all of that, I think we're starting to get people who wouldn't traditionally be thinking about testing. Obviously, like, ideas permeate. Right. So you might have somebody who's thinking about testing on a day that they are doing an employee onboarding and thinking, well, how do I, how do I test this? How do I test the software that I'm using? How do I test my methodology? All of it. So if we do a good job at this podcast and we talk about testing enough, my prediction is that we will earworm our way into other parts of the business besides software.

Jason Baum [00:05:37]:

Yeah, I definitely think that low-code, no-code solutions that are out there are enabling some more of this kind of stuff. I also think the Internet of things and the amount of different devices that can be tested is like. And we've had this conversation, we had this conversation with Jason Huggins even like the world is software at this point. But also in the same vein, when we had the conversation we said and everything's broken and nothing works. And so I think there's this double-edged sort of, everything's sort of available but at the same time, perhaps quality isn't necessarily at the same. I mean we know it's not up there with speed on the priority list, right. So hopefully maybe it's going to gain more traction in 2025. Maybe we're going to see quality start to take more, more emphasis around quality with incidents that have happened and some popular bugs and the fact that the world is more kind of like these edge case testing opportunities.

Jason Baum [00:06:40]:

So I don't know.

Evelyn Coleman [00:06:41]:

That's a good point. Now you're bringing the price devices everywhere. And also I feel like I see more bugs. I feel like when I first, when I first started at soft, somebody asked me like, can you, let's make a list of like all the bugs we've seen in day to day for the next, for last month, I remember being like really hard pressed to find anything. Even though I use apps every day, I just wasn't seeing them. And now if you put me through the same exercise, I talk about it all the time, talk about it with my friends, the stuff that we see, the problems that we face. And the natural next step would be to talk about, well, what's going on here. And I think testing is a natural part of that conversation.

Marcus Merrell [00:07:18]:

I think things are going to have to get worse before they get better in order to get more testing permeated throughout society in general. I, that's my prediction is that we're not going to see a big trend on improving that state. But I kind of think it's inevitable. I just think things are going to have to get worse before they get better. That's my, that's my personal prediction on that. And I could be wrong, of course.

Jason Baum [00:07:39]:

Marcus, rather than me throw one out, I'm going to throw one in your direction to maybe throw out. What is 2025 going to look like?

Marcus Merrell [00:07:48]:

I really don't, I don't see clear concrete evidence that 2024 brought us any closer between the product, the promise and the fulfillment. I see still we are in the world of promise and fantasy land and breathless anticipation and people who are so enthusiastic and hot on it that they're either not thinking critically or they're in on the grift. I just don't see it. I think that the improvements that I see in the real-world impacts of AI that are real and are impressive are people who know how to operate and prompt and copy and paste from the output into their IDE and help themselves explain, understand things better by having a conversation with AI to sort of help them think through things. But in terms of seamlessly natively incorporating these tools into our workflow, I don't feel like we made all that much progress this year. I think 2025 could be the year where we like, there are some very measurably good things about AI that have happened making them incorporated into the workflow a little bit better that I can absolutely see because we've been talking about it for so long. We kind of know what we need to do and it's kind of a solved problem. Just do it now.

Marcus Merrell [00:09:03]:

And so that's what I'm hoping we see in 2025 is making those things more real. Because right now, they're just not.

Jason Baum [00:09:08]:

Yeah, we need more real thought leadership on AI. And I'm going to call you out, Markus. I think you have a really great talk on it. I've seen a lot of other talks more recently, even Marc Hornbeek and Evelyn. You were referring to Marc Hornbeek before, right?

Evelyn Coleman [00:09:24]:

I have some. I know some of you have the same last names. Yes.

Jason Baum [00:09:27]:

So Mark was talking about AI, I think, really well on the podcast the last time when he was mentioning the use cases right now. And you actually both talk about it very similarly, Marcus, and its use cases for testing, which is interesting. And I think that type of message needs to be heard more. And so I would recommend especially to conferences, my gosh, maybe less AI talks and more quality AI talks. That would be a good start because I think there's a lot of people who do want to know more and not just some, I don't know, watching a movie at this point with some of these guesses that people have. Evelyn, do you got another one?

Evelyn Coleman [00:10:12]:

Oh, I'm trying to try to put it into words. Something that I have been seeing recently is companies having these sort of initiatives around risk reduction and change management. And now I'm thinking like, okay, what does that mean for 2025? Because I could see how that would translate to a trend maybe next year, like, you know, 2026, where we would get from change management all the way to testing. But I'm not sure that those initiatives are going to make enough ground in one year to make the connection between how we manage changes in software to prime that back to testing. So I would say that's like a late trend. Late 2025, 2026.

Marcus Merrell [00:11:03]:

I feel like not enough people are talking about that. And if you're seeing it as a trend, if you're seeing it more, that's very encouraging to me. So I hope that's a trend. I hope you're right.

Evelyn Coleman [00:11:12]:

Yeah. And not say it's not going to get worse before it gets better. But I think that we're on a path that leads to a quality conversation. I don't know if that's much of a different trend than the one I pointed out before, but there are definitely initiatives that are seeding the ground for trends. So maybe this next year we stay with the shift left, we stay with the AI, and we don't really see anything big come out of testing until later next year. That'd be my guess.

Jason Baum [00:11:42]:

We need a Marcus-approved stamp on some of these. If we could do that in production, that'd be great. I want to challenge the shift left real quick if I can. And then, Marcus, I would love to hear your thoughts. And Evelyn would love to hear your thoughts on that too, since you just said it. But okay, if shift left is included in a. In a trend. Because I've seen shift left even being, I think every year shift left is a trend.

Jason Baum [00:12:10]:

And perhaps there's a lot of organizations that are not mature. They have not gotten to that level of maturity. They haven't shifted left. Is it a trend anymore? How many years can you be into something where it's a trend? If anything, I feel like I'm seeing a whole lot more shift right and testing in production than I am anything new, really, when it comes to shift left. I think shifting left as a theory, like, no one argued, no one argues it. But like, if I was to say trend, I think production, testing and production seems to be much more trendy at the moment. At least that's my purview.

Marcus Merrell [00:12:55]:

Whether or not you're shifting left is kind of dependent on where your starting point is. When you say shift left with no context, what I think of is let's pull functional and integration testing earlier into the process. Let's have developers write unit tests, developers write integration tests, developers write playwright tests, which are, you know, a little easier to craft sometimes than Selenium tests. Let's run those because they're faster. They can happen in the pipeline. In that case, I completely agree with you that I think it's a little bit. It's been a trend for so long that it's just like. Actually, I'm not sure.

Marcus Merrell [00:13:26]:

I think people who have done it or people who are going to do it, they've already done it. I spoke to a customer just last week who basically had to admit, now we don't really do unit tests and we, you know, things are not breaking, so let's just keep whatever. And so where I do think shift left is seeing measurable gains. And what I. What I would call a trend is security and accessibility. Those two kinds of testing are starting. They start later in the process. They're much, much closer to the point of release.

Marcus Merrell [00:13:54]:

And those are moving back to QA and development. And so those two, at least. And there's probably some others that we could think of. So it depends on what you're shifting. But I think those two are shifting left and otherwise you're right. They're kind of. We're kind of in fantasy land if we think that that's going to be this big revolution coming. It's already come.

Marcus Merrell [00:14:13]:

And a lot of people shrugged.

Evelyn Coleman [00:14:14]:

I have a question about this, and forgive me if I'm being too imaginative, but we shift left. The industry shifts left for a decade, right? Depending on the part of the testing, Maybe some of it is later adopted, maybe some of it's early adopted. As Jason mentioned, he's seeing some trends towards shifting right again. Are those lay adopters, the ones who never managed to shift left? Are they now at the head of the race? Are they in pole position on the way back right again? Or are they gonna. Are the. Are slow adopters still slow adopters? And they're gonna be overtaken eventually by the people who early adopted ship left?

Jason Baum [00:14:57]:

My theory, since I threw it out, I think because it's been around for so long, shift left as a principle, right? We want to pull everything into production earlier in the process. Right. We want. By having something in production, testing, finding, errors in production. It does feel somewhat rogue at this point. It's against what we've been hearing is the way to change, the way to shift. So, yeah, that's why I'm kind of challenging it as well. It seems to be working for some.

Jason Baum [00:15:37]:

And I don't think they're completely shift right. I think it's more acknowledging that there is a use case where that makes sense and is good so that you have this complete full right, the continuous testing loop, if you will. And I think that's more what I'm kind of trying to get across. Does that make sense?

Evelyn Coleman [00:15:59]:

I think so.

Marcus Merrell [00:16:00]:

Where is the center? Yes. And I think a lot of it's going to come down to context.

Jason Baum [00:16:05]:

Yeah, well, it's different for everyone. That's why it's so hard.

Marcus Merrell [00:16:09]:

Whatever vertical you're in, if you're in financial regulated industry, your answer is going to be different from if you're at Amazon. The reason is that if you're working for a gigantic bank, you have a lot of things that have to happen in order for you to ship a new feature or ship a new version of your software. So you can't do it as often. So you really need to be careful what you put out there because actual money is moving around. Whereas if you're at Amazon and you ship a change to the product literally every eight seconds, there's kind of only so much you can do in some cases. And you just like I remember hearing someone, not from Amazon but from somewhere else, another E-Commerce, basically saying, the only thing we can really do with the volume of changes we push through is to say, here's our traffic from minute to minute 24 hours ago. If we push this change and that traffic dips, there's a problem, roll it back. And that is.

Marcus Merrell [00:16:59]:

That is shift right on the razor's edge. But I do think that that is not an unreasonable way of testing. If any given change that you put out isn't going to shatter the earth if it goes haywire, if that makes sense.

Evelyn Coleman [00:17:13]:

If you have the traffic to do it that way and you have the stability of, of consumer base to do it that way, then I could see, I could see that similar to when we have Mac on, right? To talk about gaming, you're talking about hundreds of thousands of people testing your game for you. If you see people are suddenly leaving your game and going from your game to social media as their next link, you've probably got a bug that's four.

Marcus Merrell [00:17:39]:

They're going to Reddit to complain about your game.

Evelyn Coleman [00:17:41]:

They're going to Reddit to complain about your game. And you should probably roll back that last batch of tests. Like again, the financial institution, smaller companies. And that's why I said it's about late adopters. Right. The early adopters are the ones that could afford to try shifting left. And those same people who could afford to try shifting left are going to be the same people who can afford to try testing in production, and everybody else is just trying to keep up.

Marcus Merrell [00:18:08]:

Absolutely. It's fascinating because you can. Like I'm now kind of convincing myself that if you're not shifting right, when you could. You're probably being irresponsible, even though it is this crazy way of testing that's, you know, so frowned upon by so many folks. But if you could test that way just by watching users and letting users be your testers, like, to me, it seems like a very responsible thing to do. You just have to understand the risk.

Jason Baum [00:18:32]:

Yeah, I think it's balance. Wax on, wax off. Right. Where Mr. Miyagi taught balance, that we must, we must always remember. Mr. Miyagi.

Evelyn Coleman [00:18:41]:

Yes. If you are listening to this podcast and you have a brand new app that you built in your school or your program, or you are just getting started and you have one customer, please do not listen to this.

Jason Baum [00:18:59]:

Don't shift right.

Evelyn Coleman [00:19:01]:

Don't shift right.

Marcus Merrell [00:19:02]:

Understand your context.

Jason Baum [00:19:04]:

I think in general, shifting left is always better as a mentality to have when it comes to everything within production. The earliest stage you could do something, the better. Right.

Marcus Merrell [00:19:19]:

That concept, I think you could say shifting left is always safer for sure. Yeah, it requires more institutional discipline, probably requires a higher order of skill set, but not everyone can do it, and.

Jason Baum [00:19:30]:

It's harder to achieve across.

Evelyn Coleman [00:19:31]:

But if you risk it to get the biscuit and you're willing to shift right and you have the. The funds and the user base and the dedication, there could be high reward in it for you.

Jason Baum [00:19:44]:

There's certainly an argument for both. I think it takes us back to. I don't think either is a trend. Then neither one's a trend. Neither one's a trend. That's where we got to. This was a trend episode. Guys, how did we get so far down? Because if we start talking about shift left, shift right, we could talk about it forever, and we probably should do more of it, because it really is interesting to me because so much about strategy comes down to where people are aligning themselves as shift left, shift right, and perhaps no shift, no shift is the answer.

Marcus Merrell [00:20:15]:

Get some guests from actual places.

Jason Baum [00:20:17]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I should ask Marc Hornbeek more about it. All right, so let's get back to it. I'm going to throw one out here. Oh, I guess I just did.

Evelyn Coleman [00:20:26]:

I think I saw a post on LinkedIn about an update with Sauce, visual and mobile. So I guess my question is, what are the testing trends when it comes to testing tools?

Marcus Merrell [00:20:39]:

I think accessibility testing is overall a trend forced by new regulations coming in from the European Union, whether people want it to or not. It's not one of those organic things, but people are going to start to feel the need to do more accessibility testing. Which, you know, I'm a fan of. So what is it?

Jason Baum [00:20:54]:

June 28, 2025, something like that?

Marcus Merrell [00:20:57]:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It might be the 25th. I don't remember exactly what day, but it's, it's somewhere around there. And you know, it's not going to be like bunch of people are going to be thrown in jail overnight. I mean, God forbid we have some accountability. But it is, it will be kind of a slow roll, kind of like GDPR, but it will be a thing. Like it will be taken seriously and enforced differently by each of the 27 member states of the European Union. But so I think that accessibility testing will be a trend and I think tooling will be a fairly big part of that because that's how we scale things.

Jason Baum [00:21:26]:

Yeah. Such as visual tools like you called out.

Marcus Merrell [00:21:30]:

Visual in particular, has a good role to play here.

Jason Baum [00:21:33]:

Yeah. All right, all right, Real quick. Rapid fire Quantum computing. That ever happening? 2025 happening. Is it happening? Yay. Nay.

Marcus Merrell [00:21:45]:

No, nay. I don't think we're going to see a single commercial available offering that helps anyone listening to this within the year 2025. And if you tell me that there is, there's a good chance you're in on it. But I'm still curious. I would love to be wrong, but I think it's, it's just, it's just fiction at this point in terms of being down boots on the ground, something that we'll actually be able to use in the next. I'm going to say five years, but maybe just one year. I don't know.

Jason Baum [00:22:12]:

All right, all right. Another real quick.

Evelyn Coleman [00:22:14]:

You're not invited to my quantum computing testing company that I'm founding in 2025. You. But your invitation has been revoked.

Jason Baum [00:22:22]:

Can't wait to see that company's. Next one. Ethical AI testing. Can you test it for ethics?

Marcus Merrell [00:22:32]:

Yeah, you can.

Jason Baum [00:22:34]:

Ethical?

Marcus Merrell [00:22:34]:

Not, not perfectly, but you can, you can at least hit the edges of it. Well, so there's a guy named Jason Arbon who's. Who I've talked about before. He's big in testing AI. So he's got a website. I cannot remember the URL right now, but he has all these crazy little tests that he gives to these models that tell that sort of judge whether or not it's going to be consistent and whether or not it's going to stick to ethics in one way, stick to ethics in another way. He has a lot of really interesting ideas about how to both prompt and measure the results coming out of, of these models. And I think that it's.

Marcus Merrell [00:23:09]:

I'm not going to say 100%, I'm not going to say even 70%, but I think that there is a framework you can give an AI to generally tell whether or not it's going to stay within some ethical consideration given some limitation of proportion. I'm. I'm not going to be as contrarian as usual on that question because I've actually seen some interesting shit.

Evelyn Coleman [00:23:26]:

No, I'm going to go with a hard name. I agree that it's possible, but I don't know if we'll be able to see that kind of work at scale. And the reason is the trend for scale is using AI, so you can't test. I don't think you could test AI using AI for ethics. You'd have to use frameworks are a little bit more manual and have to be checked more rigorously. And. And I think that the industry trend is towards cutting back on some of those less scalable things.

Marcus Merrell [00:23:58]:

I respect the answer. I think that there's some challenges with some of the folks that are there, but I'm eager to see it play out. I'm at least glad it is a conversation. I'm very glad it's a conversation.

Jason Baum [00:24:09]:

Awesome. That was a lot of fun. Thanks so much, Marcus. Thanks so much, Evelyn. Really appreciate the conversation on trends. And maybe we got something right. You know, I think that's the fun part about trends. It's based off of knowledge.

Jason Baum [00:24:25]:

And I would say, you know, you're both incredibly knowledgeable people and I'm just lucky to be around you. But, you know, I think it's still a prediction, right? And so some predictions come true, some predictions don't. So I think it would be cool to revisit this episode perhaps a year from now and maybe do this on an annual basis and do our annual trend review versus end trend projections, which could be kind of fun. Would love to see how accurate we are. And you'll just have to wait for that episode an entire year. So thank you for joining us for this one and what will be our inaugural one and we hope to catch you again on Test Case Scenario. Thanks so much, everyone. Thank you, Evelyn.

Jason Baum [00:25:12]:

Thank you, Marcus, and thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. Thank you for joining us on Test Case Scenario. Share your thoughts in the comments. We'll make sure to respond to each and every single one. Don't forget to subscribe and hit that notification bell to keep in touch. If you missed our last episode, it's popping up on your screen. Right now.

Jason Baum [00:25:40]:

Go click it. Until next time on Test Case Scenario.