The rapid pace of digital transformation has made quality assurance (QA) an essential driver of innovation, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. QA teams are no longer just enabling reliability—they are shaping the future of software development.
The State of Continuous Testing Report highlights the opportunities and challenges facing today’s QA teams:
- AI Adoption: Nearly 60% of respondents believe AI will significantly impact their 2025 strategies, underscoring the importance of targeted investments and upskilling.
- Cloud-Based Collaboration: With 57% of respondents adopting cloud-based solutions, distributed teams are scaling testing efforts globally and achieving seamless collaboration.
- Accessibility and Compliance: A growing emphasis on inclusivity and regulatory adherence reflects the shift toward user-centric design and organizational accountability.
At Perforce, we recognize these challenges as strategic imperatives.
Our comprehensive quality solutions empower teams to embrace innovation, mitigate risks, and thrive in an ever-evolving landscape. This report is not just an analysis of trends—it’s a practical roadmap to help QA teams navigate the future with confidence and clarity.
Here’s what to know about the 2025 State of Continuous Testing Report:
- WHO: Hundreds of testing professionals participated, representing roles such as QA/Dev Practitioners, DevOps Managers, QA Managers, QA Leads, and VPs of Testing.
- WHAT: Topics covered include test automation, open source tools, AI in testing, accessibility, and compliance.
- WHEN: The report reflects experiences of testing teams in 2024 and provides insights to guide 2025 strategies.
- WHERE: Respondents from North America, EMEA, and APAC ensure a globally representative perspective.
- WHY: Perforce’s commitment to advancing the testing and DevOps community drives this report, providing a roadmap for success in a rapidly changing software landscape.
Below is a small preview of the insights you can expect to find within the report in addition to emerging industry trends to be mindful of and actionable recommendations for teams seeking to transform their testing.
Table of Contents
- Adopting Artificial Intelligence in Testing
- Security Rises as a Priority
- Test Data Management Poses a Major Hurdle
- Accessibility and Inclusivity: Expanding Digital Boundaries
- Meet Perforce Continuous Testing
Adopting Artificial Intelligence in Testing
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has solidified its place as a game-changer in the testing industry, reshaping strategies throughout 2025. While initial adoption faced hesitations, AI has become indispensable, enabling teams to achieve unmatched efficiency, precision, and speed.
Over 75% of survey respondents identified AI-driven testing as a pivotal component of their strategy for 2025. This growing momentum reflects a clear shift toward embracing AI’s transformative potential, with teams actively exploring how to integrate it into their workflows for maximum impact.
At Perforce, BlazeMeter and Perfecto lead the charge in AI-driven testing innovation, delivering solutions powered by four foundational pillars:
- Effortless Test Creation: Simplify even the most complex tests with AI-driven templates and auto-generated test cases.
- Seamless Test Execution: Execute large-scale tests with unprecedented consistency and reliability, minimizing bottlenecks.
- Instant Issue Analysis: Harness real-time insights to pinpoint defects and determine root causes within seconds.
- Self-Sustaining Maintenance: Reduce maintenance efforts with adaptive AI functionality that evolves alongside your applications.
AI isn’t just advancing testing — it’s redefining it. By leveraging the AI capabilities of BlazeMeter and Perfecto, QA teams can position themselves as industry leaders, driving innovation and ensuring excellence in an ever-changing landscape.
Security Rises as a Priority
As organizations integrate AI-driven testing into their strategies, security has become a defining priority for QA teams. The adoption of shift-left testing methods has brought security testing to the forefront, embedding it as a critical step in identifying vulnerabilities early in the development lifecycle.
Nearly 50% of respondents cited evaluating software systems or network security to uncover vulnerabilities as a top priority for the next six to twelve months. This underscores the growing recognition of proactive security measures as a cornerstone of effective testing strategies.
Security is no longer an afterthought. It is the foundation of trust, reliability, and success in today’s fast-evolving digital landscape. To stay ahead, organizations must embed robust security testing into every stage of development and leverage innovative solutions like synthetic test data to safeguard their processes.
Test Data Management Poses a Major Hurdle
Test data is the critical fuel that powers the testing engine—its quality directly impacts the stability, reliability, and success of test execution. Without high-quality test data, testing efforts risk inefficiency, errors, and compromised results.
For many QA teams, test data management remains a significant challenge. Manual test data management, cited as the biggest hurdle by respondents, is resource-intensive, error-prone, and time-consuming. Additionally, issues like incomplete and poor-quality test data, coupled with security concerns, create further obstacles that hinder testing effectiveness and compliance.
To overcome these challenges, solutions like Delphix combine test data masking with advanced data virtualization to transform how teams manage sensitive data. By discovering data subject to privacy laws, replacing it with realistic yet fictitious values, and instantly delivering masked, virtual data copies into testing environments, Delphix ensures compliance, safeguards data, and quickly provisions reliable, high-quality test data for QA teams.
Effective test data management is no longer optional—it is a critical foundation for driving efficiency, maintaining compliance, and achieving testing excellence. With the right tools and strategies, QA teams can turn test data challenges into opportunities for innovation and growth.
Accessibility and Inclusivity: Expanding Digital Boundaries
Accessibility testing has emerged as a strategic priority for QA teams, with 32% of respondents identifying it as a key focus. This trend reflects not only increasing regulatory demands but also a broader commitment to creating inclusive digital experiences that serve all users, including those relying on assistive technologies.
Tools like Perfecto are empowering teams to address these demands effectively. By enabling seamless accessibility testing, identifying gaps in compliance, and aligning with standards like WCAG, Perfecto ensures applications are both inclusive and compliant. Teams using Perfecto have reported up to a 15% improvement in accessibility compliance, reinforcing its role as a leader in accessibility testing solutions.
Accessibility testing is more than meeting legal requirements—it’s a commitment to fostering inclusivity, driving user satisfaction, and positioning organizations as leaders in digital accessibility. By investing in robust accessibility strategies and tools like Perfecto, QA teams can expand their reach, improve usability, and create meaningful connections in an increasingly diverse digital landscape.
2025 State of Continuous Testing Report
The software testing industry is changing — perhaps more so than during any other period in recent memory. Download your copy of the 2025 State of Continuous Testing Report for pages bursting with insights, recommendations, and actionable next steps to ensure your testing is as good as it possibly can be in 2025.
Meet Perforce Continuous Testing
BlazeMeter
BlazeMeter was designed and built by engineers who are passionate about open source. From mobile to mainframe, IDE or UI, BlazeMeter brings teams together on a single platform with shared visibility, tests, and reports. Developers and testers can work together, using the same tool, but focus on their level of expertise. The best part? BlazeMeter provides it all: performance, functional, scriptless, API testing and monitoring, test data, and service virtualization. Enterprise organizations like BT and the New York Times use BlazeMeter to prepare their applications for peak traffic events. With BlazeMeter, development teams can speed their digital transformation and shift quality left.
Perfecto
Perfecto powers exceptional digital experiences by combining the power of flexible test authoring, cross-platform execution, and AI-driven analytics into one secure, cloud-based web and mobile testing platform. Perfecto is continually innovating to remain in step with developments in technology and new releases to ensure a seamless testing experience that stays ahead of market trends. With Perfecto, your testing strategy is simpler, more effective, and the results will speak for themselves. Visit Perfecto for a free trial, demo, or to learn more.
Delphix
Enterprises around the world choose Perforce Delphix to automate compliant data for DevOps. Businesses need to innovate quickly but struggle to balance speed with quality and compliance. The Delphix DevOps Data Platform provides integrated data masking and data virtualization to rapidly deploy compliant data into non-production environments across private, public, and hybrid clouds. With Delphix, customers automate test data management and CI/CD and swiftly recover from downtime events such as ransomware, while ensuring data privacy and governance for DevOps, AI/ML, and analytics. Leading companies, including BNP Paribas, Choice Hotels International, Worldpay, Michelin, Molina Healthcare, and Fannie Mae, use Delphix to accelerate innovation speed without compromising safety.