Daily deployments, multi-platform rollouts, and zero tolerance for bugs mean U.S. companies are asking who can help them do it faster, smarter, and with fewer headaches. Outsourced test automation is a strategy to shift risk away from internal dev teams. The question is simple: help us ship fast without breaking things. Clients want vendors who can write tests, integrate into CI/CD, automate security, use AI to optimize effort, scale across devices and regions and track coverage and bugs like product metrics. The best testing partners act like performance multipliers. They don’t just catch bugs but accelerate releases.
This article is based on the test automation portfolio of a custom software development firm, Belitsoft. The company confirmed its 20+ years of expertise with a 4,9/5 score on the most credible B2B review sources, such as Gartner, G2, Goodfirms, and others. Belitsoft’s clients have collaborated with this partner for 5+ years. Adhering to best practices and bringing experience from multiple industries, such as FinTech, Healthcare, E-commerce, EdTech, and more, the company provides its customers with a vast pool of Python developers. They are professionals in architecting, automation testing, and implementing QA processes. Belitsoft applies all types and levels of software testing for complex commercial tech projects in data analysis, data science, machine learning, research science, and finance.
Trends in 2025 Test Automation Hiring
Managed Testing Services Are the New Default
Companies aren’t building giant internal QA teams but are engaging managed service providers who can scale test coverage on demand. Need dozens device/browser combinations tested overnight? Want parallel testing for several app versions across iOS and Android? U.S. clients use managed testing services to escape hiring a QA army. These vendors bring frameworks, device farms, and domain experts – often working as embedded teams – and help clients ship faster without flooding their backlog with regression bugs.
AI Is Now Built into the Testing Stack
Clients want to know if the vendor is using AI for acceleration. That means:
- AI-generated test cases from product specs
- Test data generation for edge scenarios
- Pattern detection on test failures.
Vendors who can implement this – using tools like Testim, Mabl, or TestGrid, or building on top of GPT – are outpacing those still writing scripts by hand. For high-volume testing teams, AI-driven workflows reduce rework. Clients want faster and smarter tests.
There’s also demand for AI validation: testing ML systems for bias, model performance degradation, or unintentional data leaks.
Always-On QA
Testing now starts at commit and continues in prod. QA teams are expected to be part of the dev workflow – not a separate sign-off step. That means:
- Unit and integration tests run on every production release
- Monitoring real user behavior in production
- Feature flag testing
- Testing observability tools (like Datadog synthetic checks or Cypress dashboards).
Service providers who call themselves QA partners need to deliver across that whole spectrum. U.S. companies want testers who can write automation, but also know Git, CI tools (GitHub Actions, CircleCI), monitoring, and post-release rollback strategies. QA is no longer just pre-launch validation.
Low-Code Testing
Low-code or no-code tools like Leapwork, TestProject, and Katalon let teams design automated flows without scripting. Clients try to set these tools up, configure test suites, and train internal users to extend them. Especially non-technical stakeholders like to use codeless testing.
Industry-Specific Demand for Test Automation Services
In 2025, nearly every industry is automating QA – but what they test, and how they validate, all look different depending on the business.
Finance and Banking
In 2025, financial institutions are hiring test automation vendors to prevent regulatory failure, security incidents, and system-wide meltdowns under load. If a provider can’t speak the language of compliance, security controls, or system-of-record integrations, they’re not getting the deal.
Compliance
Test automation in banking starts with regulatory coverage. QA vendors are expected to map tests to privacy laws, fraud detection policies, and cybersecurity mandates. That includes validating that new deployments don’t break data handling protocols, user consent flows, or encryption at rest and in transit. API testing is core for banks integrating with third-party fintech platforms under open banking mandates. Test cases need to cover authorization, scope validation, and abuse edge cases. Deliverables are expected to include formal documentation: audit-ready logs, traceability matrices, and evidence of full coverage on transactional flows like fund transfers, loan processing, and trading algorithms. If that evidence isn’t built into the test suite, the vendor isn’t ready for financial clients.
Security testing
Financial QA vendors must deliver automated penetration testing, static scans for OWASP Top 10 issues, and anomaly detection. AI-based tools are now used to detect behavioral anomalies or fraud attempts – especially in systems like mobile banking, online credit card applications, or trading platforms. U.S. banks expect partners to simulate threats, not just check for bugs.
Load testing
Financial apps are subject to usage spikes. Every payday, every earnings call, every interest rate hike – traffic surges, and the system has to hold. Vendors are expected to run performance tests that simulate thousands of concurrent users across mobile, web, and API layers. That includes validation of response times under stress, memory and CPU metrics, and failover behavior.
Banks now require vendors to run tests in staging environments that mirror production, sometimes even shadow-testing in prod using canary builds.
After the 2024 software incident that took down 8.5 million endpoints, financial clients now ask direct questions about how testing environments are configured and how incidents are prevented.
End-to-end testing covers the entire transaction lifecycle
Modern banking is integration-heavy. Loan applications must touch five systems before approval. A failed webhook, timeout, or broken mapping can kill the flow.
That’s why financial institutions hire QA vendors to write fully automated, end-to-end regression tests that run nightly or on every code change.
These simulate entire business processes: loan application → credit check → account funding → notification dispatch. Every step validated, every integration covered. CI/CD pipelines must trigger test suites automatically and fail builds if critical paths are broken.
The bar for vendor readiness is high
Finance clients want QA teams who know how bank flows work, understand risk posture, and can deliver to pass internal audits. Deliverables include compliance reports, SLA adherence logs, vulnerability scans, test coverage dashboards, and performance benchmarks. The message is: move fast, but never without control. QA partners that enable speed and assurance are seen as strategic assets.
Healthcare and Life Sciences
In healthcare automation has to do more than test features. In 2025, providers, payers, device manufacturers expect test automation vendors to think like a regulatory body.
Patient Safety
Every release has to validate that the system doesn’t introduce harm. That means verifying dosage calculations, data handoffs, and medical rulesets – not just UI flows. A regression suite may simulate thousands of patient journeys: medication refills, allergy flags, appointment reschedules, insurance rejections. Health systems may also use automated tests to validate drug interaction warnings across several pharmacy platforms.
HIPAA and Regulatory Testing
Every QA engagement assumes PHI will be handled, so encryption, access control, session expiration, and audit logging are default test cases. Test automation vendors are expected to validate permission boundaries, for example, that nurses can’t view mental health records, or that lab results are only accessible to authorized providers. If the system qualifies as a medical device, FDA validation protocols apply. Vendors provide signed test documentation, requirement traceability matrices, and test plans formatted to fit regulatory submissions.
Security, Load, and Recovery
Healthcare systems need to be online, accurate, and always protected. That means automated penetration testing, DDoS simulations, and backup validation are part of the test stack. QA partners are expected to simulate concurrency – hundreds of patients accessing their portal during a flu outbreak or vaccination campaign – and show what happens at failure thresholds. Deliverables often include performance benchmarks, recovery time verification, and data persistence checks under load.
Interoperability
A new EHR module still needs to pull lab results, push billing codes, and update patient records in real time. QA vendors are expected to write end-to-end tests across integrations: HL7 messaging, FHIR APIs, legacy systems, third-party scheduling platforms.
One healthcare provider discovered that lab results were mapped incorrectly in one EHR environment – caught only because the test suite validated record synchronization at field level. That’s the kind of failure that test automation has to prevent and the kind of detail clients expect.
Documentation
Deliverables include test protocols, signed reports, traceability artifacts, and risk logs. Healthcare clients treat QA outputs as part of the regulatory defense. Many vendors also provide QA process audits and advise on how to align dev/testing workflows with health-specific standards. If a vendor can’t walk through how they map a test case to a regulatory requirement – and produce the documentation on demand – they’re not ready for the domain.
Retail and E-Commerce
In retail, bugs lead to lost revenue. Test automation is a revenue safeguard. A broken promo code, a slow checkout flow, or an unresponsive app during a flash sale directly hits the bottom line. That’s why in 2025, clients expect outsourced QA partners to think in terms of conversion funnels, not just pass/fail results.
End-to-End Customer Flow Coverage
Retail clients want full simulation of customer behavior – add-to-cart, apply discount, checkout with Apple Pay, receive confirmation email, pick up in-store. That entire flow needs to be covered with automation. QA teams are expected to build regression suites that mirror real user journeys across channels – web, mobile, POS. Tests validate integrations between front-end, inventory systems, and logistics APIs. A successful run is a proof that promotions apply correctly, taxes calculate accurately, loyalty points sync, and store inventory reflects real-time status. Every bug that delays a sale or causes abandonment is now traceable to QA performance.
Load Testing Has to Match Reality
Clients expect QA vendors to simulate traffic surges – hundreds and thousands shoppers browsing simultaneously, hundreds concurrent checkouts, hundreds new orders per second. Vendors are tasked with running these scenarios against cloud environments, load balancers, and caching layers. The deliverables include test reports with thresholds, fail points, and infrastructure stress markers.
Security Testing
Every retail app touches payment data. Every vendor is expected to validate PCI-DSS compliance, perform injection and script vulnerability checks, and confirm that payment credentials aren’t logged or exposed. Test automation vendors integrate these checks into CI/CD pipelines, ensuring that every release is scanned before it goes live. Security testing covers everything from expired session handling to rate-limiting abuse. Clients also request reports showing failed attack attempts.
Accessibility and Cross-Device Compatibility
Automation needs to validate that retail experiences work across phones, tablets, assistive technologies, and in multiple languages or locales. Accessibility checks are now automated – scanning for alt text, label coverage, keyboard navigation. QA vendors who can deliver real-world accessibility test plans – backed by tooling like Axe, Lighthouse, or Deque – are prioritized.
Retail Clients Want Velocity Without Sacrificing Coverage
The best automation teams work inside the CI/CD pipeline. Tests are triggered per release, per environment, across dozens of browser/device combinations. Reports land in Slack or Jira within minutes. When holiday launches are on the line, feedback time matters.
One large retail brand ran 80% of its regression tests automatically across its full unified commerce stack (web, app, POS). When mobile coupon logic failed under certain conditions, automation caught it – days before launch. That test saved the campaign.
Telecommunications
In 2025, every major telco is trying to modernize while still carrying decades of technical debt. And when customer experience spans from mobile app to physical network – with CRM, billing, and support layers in between – testing becomes one of the only tools that can hold the stack together.
End-to-End Process Testing
Telecom workflows don’t live in one system. Ordering a phone plan, provisioning a SIM, activating a device, triggering billing – these may run through five platforms. That’s why QA vendors are hired to write test automation simulating a complete business process from signup to support. Vendors deliver cross-system test suites that validate service flows across CRM, OSS/BSS, order management, and network systems. These tests are about catching broken data handoffs, and asynchronous failures that only show up when systems talk to each other.
Performance Testing
Telecom apps and platforms must hold under scale – not just user traffic, but machine-to-machine transactions, sensor updates, and API bursts. QA vendors are expected to simulate thousands of concurrent sessions – logins, bandwidth checks, service switches – and map system behavior under stress.
Clients demand SLA-aligned reports showing throughput, latency, recovery time, and API responsiveness under peak usage.
Legacy Modernization Needs Test Automation
Many telecom platforms run on ancient infrastructure – mainframes, COBOL-based billing engines, or tightly coupled C++ stacks. Replacing these systems while keeping operations live is risky.
Test automation is used to validate that new systems behave like old ones – same logic, same pricing, same customer outcomes. QA vendors build diff-testing frameworks that compare outputs from legacy and replacement systems at scale.
Codeless automation also plays a role here allowing telco domain experts (not just engineers) to design and maintain tests.
Protocol-Level and Network-Specific Testing
Telecom vendors are expected to validate network behavior at the protocol level. That means simulating call flows, validating SIP or 5G NR messaging, verifying handovers, or testing SDN configurations under dynamic routing scenarios.
QA teams often bring their own simulation hardware or use vendor testbeds.
Telecom clients care about “it doesn’t drop your call on the highway.” Generalist test firms can’t handle that.
IoT and Multi-Network Testing
Telcos don’t just provide mobile service – they support smart meters, wearables, connected cars, and enterprise IoT deployments. QA vendors are tasked with building test automation that accounts for device variability, inconsistent connectivity, and roaming behavior across 3G, 4G, 5G, and Wi-Fi networks.
Tests have to validate how apps or devices behave when signals drop, switch, or throttle.
In telecom, downtime is public. QA vendors that succeed in this space understand the architecture, write tests that reduce support call spikes, prevent bill miscalculations, and ensure that the next OTA config doesn’t bring down subscribers.
Manufacturing and Industrial IoT
In 2025, industrial firms treat QA the same way they treat machine maintenance: scheduled, and automated. Test automation is a core part of how manufacturers validate the performance, safety, and resilience of their digital infrastructure – across both IT systems and operational technology (OT).
Industrial IoT Testing
Factories now run on a dense mesh of connected sensors, actuators, and control systems. QA teams are tasked with validating that telemetry data flows without corruption, control commands execute reliably, and the system behaves safely when inputs fail or networks degrade. Deliverables include device compatibility matrices, failure response logs, and reports showing test coverage across different protocols (MQTT, Modbus, OPC UA, etc.). Some vendors operate lab environments to replicate harsh industrial conditions and provide firmware validation before field deployment.
ERP and MES Integration
Manufacturers depend on tight coordination between ERP, MES, supply chain, and logistics systems. One broken interface – like a failed inventory update or a misrouted work order – can ripple across the entire production plan. That’s why clients expect end-to-end automation that covers order-to-cash, inventory flows, and production execution. Automation vendors combine API validation, UI regression (especially for legacy systems), and integration mocks to test these chains. A common deliverable: a test suite wired into the CI/CD pipeline that verifies business-critical flows after every ERP upgrade or integration patch. Clients want assurance that a new SAP module doesn’t break MES triggers, or that a custom field in Oracle SCM doesn’t silently fail downstream. Regression suites are built to guarantee continuity in physical operations.
Fault Injection and Failover Testing
Manufacturing systems need to recover. QA vendors simulate controller failures, dropped packets, overloaded queues, and device-level disconnects. An automation test may force a node in a distributed control system offline mid-process, and verify that the system re-routes control without data loss or unsafe conditions.
Test scripts validate backup transitions, power loss recovery, and watchdog triggers. Clients expect failover test reports as standard deliverables, showing how systems behave under stress – especially in real-time or safety-critical loops. Vendors who understand industrial control systems, PLCs, and SCADA architectures are often favored for these contracts – because generalist QA providers won’t know how to inject faults without bricking the system.
Compliance and Validation
For manufacturers in regulated verticals (pharma, aerospace, food production), vendors are expected to deliver documentation for every tested requirement, validation protocol adherence, and audit trails of each test execution.
In pharma, for example, tests tied to FDA validation may cover everything from temperature control logic to cleaning cycle automation.
Deliverables include validation reports ready for submission with evidence that requirements were met and risks mitigated.
Technology and Software Companies
Even the most engineering-driven product companies bring in outside QA vendors when they need to scale faster, cover more ground, or go deeper into specialized testing that internal teams can’t staff for. The external QA teams are expected to plug into the same workflows, match the same standards, and deliver with the same velocity as in-house teams.
Startups and SaaS
For early-stage SaaS companies, the task is to build us a test system that works without babysitting. Startups often don’t have a dedicated QA function – their developers write a few unit tests and call it good until something breaks in prod.
Vendors step in to set up automation from zero: choose the right test stack (Playwright + GitHub Actions, etc.), write critical path tests (signup, onboarding, billing), and integrate everything into CI. Deliverables include Slack alerts, test dashboards, and pipelines that run before every merge. The goal is full regression safety without slowing down feature work.
Mid-Market Tech
Mid-sized software companies have QA teams, but gaps show up fast – especially in performance, security, or device coverage. They bring in vendors not to replace QA, but to extend it.
One release may need a load test for a new feature. Another may need a penetration test to pass an enterprise deal.
In 2025, crowdtesting is also rising: testing updates on dozens of device/OS combos across countries, networks, and locales. Vendors provide exploratory and functional test results from dozens of configurations overnight – something in-house testers can’t replicate without a lab. The result is better cross-platform confidence and fewer support tickets post-release. Deliverables here are often device coverage reports, security validation docs, or performance regression graphs tied to release candidates.
Enterprises
Vendors are brought in to implement test strategy for new lines of business, build test harnesses for experimental features, or backfill mature product lines with regression coverage.
In some cases, QA vendors are tasked with integrating AI tooling (model-based test generation, predictive defect detection, etc.) or modernizing internal test frameworks.
These engagements are collaborative: vendors work in the same sprints, attend the same standups, and push to the same repos. Deliverables are held to internal benchmarks – including code coverage targets, test flakiness reports, and velocity metrics.
Tech Expectations Are Higher Across the Board
Regardless of company size, tech clients expect QA partners to walk in already fluent in:
- Modern frameworks (Cypress, Playwright, Appium, REST Assured, etc.)
CI/CD tools (GitLab, CircleCI, GitHub Actions) - Cloud-native testing (containerized test runners, parallel execution, ephemeral environments)
- AI augmentation (test flakiness detection, change-based test selection, failure prediction).
They also want real-time dashboards that surface test pass/fail rates, risk heatmaps, test debt, and defect trends by area.
By 2025, even the best engineering teams aren’t trying to do everything in-house. They treat QA vendors as stack extensions. The bar is high. The timelines are tight. The teams that deliver – embedded, collaborative, infrastructure-aware – stay long term.
About the Author:
Dmitry Baraishuk is a partner and Chief Innovation Officer at a software development company Belitsoft (a Noventiq company). He has been leading a department specializing in custom software development for 20 years. The department has hundreds of successful projects in such services as healthcare and finance IT consulting, AI software development, application modernization, cloud migration, data analytics implementation, and more for US-based startups and enterprises.
