The Top Challenges in Software Testing (and How To Overcome Them)
11 November 2025Software testing is often misunderstood. You can learn more in our Software Testing Courses.
In Agile and DevOps environments, teams feel the pressure to “go faster,” and testing is sometimes blamed for slowing things down. But here’s the truth: the purpose of testing is not speed. It’s to provide information.
Good testing helps teams:
- Understand the current state of a system
- Highlight risks
- Make better decisions
Sometimes that means slowing down now - so you don’t pay the price later in rework, production outages, or unhappy customers.
Here are the top challenges in software testing today, with practical ways to move past them.
Testing is often seen as a “last phase,” but this is a planning and communication problem, not a testing one. By the time the final pieces of functionality are assembled, end-to-end testing will always be needed. The problem is that development often finishes late, which compresses the time left for proper testing.
Because end-to-end testing is the most visible to stakeholders, it often gets mistaken as the only testing happening - when in reality, good testing should occur throughout a project.
How to overcome it:
- Involve testers from the very beginning, not just at the end.
- Use testers’ analysis skills to surface assumptions and risks early.
- Make testing visible in delivery plans instead of treating it as an invisible “activity.”
Case study: At a finance client I worked with, involving testers in requirements workshops meant assumptions were challenged before any code was written. This early defect detection didn’t feel like “testing” in the traditional sense - but it was, and it avoided major rework later.
Early in projects, it’s common to see:
- Poorly articulated or incomplete requirements
- Insufficient research and knowledge discovery
- Inadequate communication and collaboration
In our Software Testing Course, we highlight how involving testers early - people skilled at analysis, curiosity, and critical thinking - can help address these shortcomings before they grow.
Automation is essential, but many teams don’t know where to start. “Automate everything” leads to flaky, high-maintenance suites. Doing nothing leaves you dependent on slow, manual cycles.
How to overcome it:
- Define clear automation goals: reduce regression effort, support continuous delivery, or free testers for exploratory work.
- Start by automating checks that repeatedly consume time and provide useful information quickly.
- Treat your test suite as a product with a backlog, ownership, and ongoing care.
Key point: The goal of automation isn’t “confidence.” It’s reliable information about the system that helps the team make better decisions.
In our Software Testing Course, we use a framework that empowers learners and teams to build test suites that are effective, robust, and sustainable - foundational skills for delivering quality software at speed in any delivery environment.
Many testers are still labelled as “manual,” but their value is much broader: exploratory, experiential, and analytical skills. The challenge is that modern teams also expect expertise in automation, APIs, performance, and security. On top of that, communication skills are often neglected - even though they’re critical for sharing findings and influencing outcomes.
How to overcome it:
- Expand beyond tooling. Strengthen exploratory testing and communication skills alongside technical growth.
- Pair testers with developers for mentoring and create space for critical thinking and storytelling.
- Support structured upskilling: coding katas, study clubs, and peer debriefs.
- Encourage collaboration across roles -testing thrives in shared conversations, not silos.
We cover T-Shaped individual skills, Square-shaped team skills, Pair testing and Exploratory testing in our Software Testing course.
4. Maintaining Quality at SpeedAgile and DevOps promise speed, but testing isn’t about making things faster -it’s about making delivery safer. “Quality” is often mentioned but rarely defined. If you can’t answer:
- What problem are we solving?
- Why is it important?
- How does solving it impact the client?
…then hitting any measure of “quality” is luck, not skill.
How to overcome it:
- Define quality in context: what matters most to your business and customers?
- Use risk-based approaches: prioritise testing where failure would hurt most.
- Think of testing as slowing down to speed up - thorough analysis and early detection reduce the rework loop and prevent downstream surprises.
We discuss at length the concepts of Quality (both Functional and Non-Functional Software Characteristics) and Value (how well the software serves its purpose for the user or business) in our Software Testing Course.
As organisations grow, testing often becomes fragmented: duplicated effort here, gaps there, inconsistent practices everywhere.
How to overcome it:
- Standardise where it creates value (frameworks, shared data, reporting).
- Encourage communities of practice or testing guilds to align approaches.
- Balance consistency with team-level flexibility.
Case study: At a large telco, testing guilds aligned practices across multiple squads. The result was shared standards without killing local autonomy.
Final ThoughtsTesting doesn’t prevent bugs - it detects them, earlier or later depending on how teams work. Its real value lies in the information it provides: surfacing assumptions, highlighting risks, and making the invisible visible.
When you reframe challenges—late testing, automation confusion, skill gaps, speed vs. quality, scaling -you see they’re not just testing problems. They’re team and organisational problems.
Our software testing course highlights delves into where the modern tester comes in. By combining:
- Analysis and exploratory skills (to spot gaps early and reduce late-stage surprises),
- Clear communication and storytelling (to make risks visible and actionable for stakeholders), and
- Collaboration across roles (to embed testing into planning, development, and delivery),
…testers help teams overcome each of these challenges in practice. They make testing continuous rather than “the last phase,” guide smarter automation choices, close skill gaps, bring clarity to what quality means, and ensure testing scales sustainably.
Thanks to Toby Thompson, SkillsDG trainer and coach, for his insights and perspective. With a background in software testing Toby is well established in the landscape of lean, agile, and design thinking.
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