Test Automation Annual Review 2007/2008

After several years of stagnation and distraction, the major testing tool vendors made substantial progress in 2007 and early 2008 in adding capabilities to their products that really matter to testers. Finally, there is renewed focus on giving testers better tools to use at all stages of the lifecycle. The vendors have come down from the lofty heights of selling a grand design for automating IT management across the board to concentrate on more pressing needs, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) testing, application security testing and a less all-encompassing IT management vision - quality management. After years of confining test automation to late lifecycle QA team testing, new requirements in the marketplace have encouraged the vendors to broaden the reach of test automation. The signs are that even better things will appear in the rest of 2008 and 2009.