It’s that time of the year when we look into our crystal balls and make predictions for the year ahead. 2016 was a phenomenal year for the technology world. Technologies that emerged over the last few years, such as cloud, firmly planted their feet within the enterprise. Businesses changed their maneuvers to leverage their digital infrastructures and found new paths to engage with their customers and make their operations more efficient. What became increasingly evident over the past year was that the IT landscape had to change to accommodate the business challenges and that the enterprise was ready to adapt to the change brought forward by technological innovation. Here’s a look at what the year ahead promises – in my view at least.

• New technologies provide new business opportunities
  2016 witnessed the rise of technologies such as Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, IoT, Machine Learning etc. Forrester Research believes that Augmented Reality will be one of the top five technologies that will completely change the world over the course of the next three to five years. Consumers have been receptive towards these new technologies. Look at the success of Pokemon Go if you are looking for examples. As consumers become more open to adopting and experimenting with new technologies, it opens up new possibilities for organizations to create new opportunities by amalgamating data, mobile devices, applications to understand customer journeys better. We can thus expect to see tech budgets focus more on business technology in this new year.
• Mobile testing all the way
  The World Quality Report 2016-17 discovered that while a large number of organizations were taking advantage of mobile solutions, mobile testing skills were relatively in their nascent stages in the development lifecycle. The lack of mobile testing experts and fragmented testing methodologies seems to have contributed to this. In 2017, however, as the number of consumer and enterprise grade mobile applications grow in demand and adoption, we can expect to see mobile testing strategies becoming more mature. Involving test engineers in the development process from the very beginning will be an assured way of improving business outcomes by delivering high quality and optimally performing app.
• The future is cloudy
  IDC estimates that by 2020 “67% of enterprise IT infrastructure and software will be for cloud-based offerings.” We can expect to see more organizations move away from the on-premise infrastructure and adopt the cloud. As the demand for agility increases, digital transformation increases and more number of companies become global, organizations will be looking towards adopting cloud to drive innovation.
• Test automation will become more mainstream
  To remain competitive, organizations will have to speed up their application development process. As the need for speedy deployments increases, 2017 will witness test automation become more mainstream. The focus on automation will be a great deal more as automation and new levels of testing to match the speed of development. Testing and application performance management tools will evolve more and provide organizations a more holistic view of their application development process and allow them to test new features.
• The rise of Performance Engineering
  2017 is also expected to witness a greater impetus placed on performance to deliver best user experiences. To enable this, organizations will no longer just depend on performance tests but will increasingly focus on performance engineering to deliver consistent and uniform application performance across diverse platforms, devices, and operating systems.
• Shift in the enterprise application landscape
  We can expect to see greater consumerization of enterprise applications. Instead of clunky enterprise apps, 2017 will usher in the era of consumer-quality enterprise applications that have intuitive user interfaces and an easily navigable information architecture even in the most complex systems. As multi-device collaboration becomes more mainstream, accessing files and information will become seamless across devices.
• Agile Outbreak
  One of the biggest trends of 2017, I believe will be that the application of agile concepts will step out of the software/product development mode and will be applied in a much wider organizational context. Agile principle derivatives will become increasingly common in areas such as design/ merchandising strategy, design thinking, growth hacking etc. and forge interdisciplinary collaborations. Methodologies such as DevOps and Continuous delivery will also adopt agile to improve outcomes and build products, as well as organizations, that can be said to be well tested and bug-free. This means integrating testing into the build model. At an organizational level, agile concepts will be implemented to improve quality by ensuring scalability, availability, easy maintenance and simplification of complex systems. Agile concepts like transparency, inspection, continuous learning, process focus, flexibility, shorter feedback loops that can benefit each and every aspect of an organization will see greater adoption.

It is certainly a very exciting time to be in this industry as we gear up to face another year that’s full of technological potential and gear up to usher in the ‘age of the customer’.