“We believe PractiTest’s inclusion in Forrester’s report reinforces the experience that our customers and partners have come to know, that our test management platform is a key component for organizations working with continuous testing strategies,” said Yaniv Iny, CEO at PractiTest. “The test market has expanded to include developers, business teams, and testing experts, and automation is critical to ensuring that they can develop smooth cross-functional processes and methodologies.”

“We see that both CAT and manual testing are required and work together. Our approach provides customers with a 360-degree view of their testing operations,” added Iny.

Continuous automation testing (CAT) platforms have taken on greater importance in recent years. These platforms reduce manual testing through multiple test automation options while providing a consistent experience for the tester.

CAT platforms deliver significant business value. They are used to automatically generate and maintain functional, business, and API tests. As software requirements and complexity increase, the cost and effort to create and maintain tests rise significantly. Automated testing allows developers to identify issues early in the build cycle, making it less expensive to fix the issue.

Test Management platforms allow teams working with multiple automation frameworks to orchestrate their testing process by integrating results from multiple testers in different locations into simple and insightful graphs and reports.  This adds value to the CAT process, providing not only execution of tests but also actionable results for the company’s stakeholders.

CAT platforms have developed into what Forrester defines as an “Established” market. They support the shift left practice in testing, integrating within the CI/CD pipeline to shorten test cycle times. Artificial intelligence plays an important role in automated testing, as does the SaaS offering that ensures testing has the flexibility, elasticity, and speed that it needs.

According to the Forrester report, “Testers are embedded in the product teams they support; they are part of the development process and can master the product they’re testing…they share expertise across products via federated centers of excellence (CoEs), practice chapters, or community-driven guilds.”

AI is reshaping the way testing is done. It enables testers to generate test cases from the requirements, identify duplicates and gaps, suggest future automation based on time constraints or resources, and generate better insights from end-to-end tests. AI can also automatically maintain tests as user interfaces change through a process known as self-healing.

The primary use cases for CAT are functional test automation, API test automation, business packaged application test automation, shift left performance testing, and test management. Functional test automation, for example, uses shift left functional test automation, test design automation, mobile, and IoT test design automation, and omnichannel UI-led test automation. It’s considered a must-have in any CAT platform.