While ruminating too much on the past can be counterproductive, there’s a lot of wisdom in taking a breath and reflecting on the previous year. In that spirit, we’re looking back on 2025 and sharing some of the best "Tips of the Month" from our 2025 customer newsletter so you can prepare for your 2026 testing strategy today.
Whether you are tackling unstable features early or are responsible for setting a data-informed 2026 testing roadmap, these insights are here to help you accelerate your quality efforts.
Tip #1: Make a plan
The end and beginning of the year are ideal times to look back on your testing successes and failures. Analyze your key metrics from 2025, such as total time to value, test flakiness rates, bug escape rate, and automation coverage. Use this data to identify your most significant pain points.
Then, outline concrete, measurable goals for 2026. Will you invest in AI-driven failure analysis? Prioritize refactoring unstable tests? A clear, data-informed strategy is the foundation for test automation maturity in the new year.
A crucial part of this initial strategy phase involves evaluating your existing test environment and infrastructure. Some questions you might ask yourself:
Are your CI/CD pipelines optimized for speed and reliability?
Do you have sufficient parallelization capabilities to handle your growing test suite?
Is your current infrastructure scalable enough to handle expected test suite growth over the next 12 months?
Consider moving toward cloud-native testing solutions in 2026 and utilizing containerization (like Docker or Kubernetes) to ensure consistent, scalable, and reproducible test execution environments. This infrastructure modernization will reduce flakiness caused by environmental instability and pave the way for embracing more advanced techniques like AI-assisted maintenance and intelligent test selection.
Tip #2: Start early exploratory testing
Exploratory testing is far from simply clicking through an application at random; it is a focused, simultaneous process of learning, designing tests, and executing them. For a successful 2026 strategy, establish a clear charter for each exploratory session, defining the scope, goals, and any specific areas of risk to investigate. Documenting key observations, defects, and new test ideas during the session ensures that the insights gained are captured and can be formalized into automated tests later.
Prioritize testing unstable features with exploratory testing early in the development cycle to identify and address issues promptly. This hands-on, unscripted approach catches major design flaws and critical usability issues before the code is heavily invested in and refactoring becomes an expensive fix. Focus your efforts on new or rapidly changing areas to maximize the return on your testing time. This approach moves exploratory testing from a sporadic activity to a consistent, high-value practice integrated into your continuous quality pipeline.
Tip 3: Tools CANNOT solve problems with people, culture, or processes
Many teams rush to adopt new tools without first fixing the foundations of their testing strategy. If you’re running automated tests regularly, using Selenium or Appium or any other tool up or down the stack, and you’re encountering regular failures (due to product change, unstable tests, or an unreliable environment), there’s a really good chance that changing the tool won’t help you. Understand the patterns of failure and fix the problems at the root first.
Tip 4: Your tests haven’t finished running until all failures are resolved
Automated test suites don’t deliver value when they finish running. They provide value when all results have been evaluated and acted on. The metric that matters is Total Time to Value—the time from when tests are triggered to when teams understand and respond to the results.
For many teams, this number is untracked or effectively infinite. Most failures are false alarms, but real bugs are often buried among them. Prioritizing fast, accurate triage is essential to making automation worthwhile.
Tip 5: Mid-Year test debt cleanup
A mid-year test refresh helps reduce tech debt, improve stability, and set the stage for smoother releases in the year's second half. June is the perfect time to audit your test suite, clean up flaky or redundant tests, and optimize execution speed to improve release efficiency.
Focus on identifying test gaps, removing outdated scripts, and ensuring CI/CD pipelines integrate AI-driven failure analysis for faster debugging. Reassess performance benchmarks and mobile test coverage to stay ahead of upcoming OS updates.
Tip 6: Get ready for seasonal testing pressure
Retail companies plan a lot of their overall business strategy around Black Friday. But you don’t have to be a retailer to experience traffic surges. No matter your industry, there is likely a time when you anticipate a surge in app traffic. Remember, it’s never too early to test for seasonal load and product changes.
Determine your team’s strategy for handling this as early as possible. Will there be a code freeze? Is there a plan for load testing? Do you understand the risks and how to eliminate or mitigate them? Does management buy into the plan? These are all important questions to ensure your customers or users have a smooth experience every day of the year.
Tip 7: Understand what those error test results really mean
When tests are marked "errored" in the Sauce Labs platform with the common "Test did not see a new command for 90 seconds" message, this typically indicates your tests aren't ending properly, rather than a Sauce Labs issue. Instead of increasing timeout values (which should only be used for non-Selenium waiting periods), ensure proper test termination or add simple Selenium commands in a loop while waiting for external processes to complete.
Takeaways
These eight tips offer a roadmap for elevating your testing strategy throughout the year. From proactive planning and addressing organizational issues to continuous maintenance and ensuring full compliance, the key thread is a commitment to quality that is data-informed and integrated into every stage of the development process.
By prioritizing these actionable steps, your team can move beyond simply running tests to truly accelerate time to value and build a culture of quality in 2026 and beyond. Read more about 2026 software testing trends from Sauce Labs, and happy testing!
