Belitsoft Reports Accelerated Demand in QA Automation for Legacy PHP Projects in 2025

Belitsoft, an automation testing company with over 20 years of expertise in the software development industry, reports the growing demand for QA automation services for outdated PHP systems. Obsolete PHP codebases that were not designed to adhere to modern DevOps practices are posing problems for manufacturing, e-commerce, finance, healthcare, and logistics companies worldwide.

The test automation market is expected to nearly triple to $49.9 billion in 2025. QA automation is being propelled in the UK by government digital initiatives such as Open Banking and NHS modernization. According to industry analysts, companies in North America and Europe are prioritizing test automation in order to lower the high levels of technical debt present in roughly 65% of legacy codebases. For organizations, the advantages are obvious: automated tests speed up regression cycles, increase confidence in the quality of app releases, and decrease manual workload while improving test coverage.

Demand Drivers

Coherence and Safety

Because many older PHP stacks make use of out-of-date libraries, vulnerabilities occur. High-profile breaches usually take advantage of legacy code. Reports state that the expensive attacks that healthcare systems now encounter, which cost an average of $10.9 million, are partly caused by outdated software that is not secure. Automated tests can include security checks (such as detecting out-of-date components) to reduce that risk. Notably, Gartner estimates that downtime costs businesses about $5,600 per minute, a risk that most companies cannot afford. Automated testing finds regressions before they are made public, preventing such crippling outages.

Regulation and Compliance Pressures

The pressure to test is especially high in regulated industries like banking and healthcare. Legacy PHP systems that manage financial transactions or patient data need to be both functional and highly secure. These applications handle the compliance, the money, and the customer trust, so they cannot be changed carelessly. Legacy PHP systems frequently support the financial industry’s core banking, trading, and risk management operations. These applications run by being audited and long-tested, so banks are loath to refactor them. Rather, they update the QA in their vicinity. Automated regression suites verify that all compliance-related features continue to work after an update.

AI-Powered Agentic Testing

Autonomous AI agents that create, run, and modify tests throughout the entire testing lifecycle are referred to as agentic testing. For example, an AI agent can write a full Playwright or Selenium script for a user scenario. The benefits are substantial: AI-driven testing offers adaptive test coverage, quicker test case execution, and more intelligent defect detection. When assessing the app, some platforms even employ large language models (LLMs) to enable the AI to mimic a variety of edge cases or real-world situations. This trend is still immature, but teams that leverage agentic tools report faster test crafting and auto-healing features that reduce manual maintenance efforts.

Modern End-to-End Frameworks

Browser testing tools have advanced. Despite WebDriver’s continued dominance, Selenium’s new rivals, such as Playwright and WebdriverIO, have become more well-known because of their cutting-edge capabilities. Playwright – as an example – has incorporated test isolation, auto-waits for elements, and native support for Firefox, Chromium, and WebKit with a single API. According to BrowserStack, Playwright offers faster performance and more recent features than older tools. WebdriverIO is a Node.js framework that can also be used to integrate contemporary front-end workflows. PHP teams can design E2E tests in JavaScript or TypeScript (using Playwright/WebdriverIO) or in PHP (using Selenium) and run them in ongoing integration. WebdriverIO and Selenium are both open-source and have large communities, which uncover shared libraries and plugins for teams. Ultimately, even legacy PHP front-ends benefit from the latest browser-automation technology, which makes test suites faster and more reliable.

Modernization and Migration to the Cloud

A lot of businesses are transferring PHP applications to cloud platforms or containers. Usually, this necessitates changing the environment (e.g., PHP 5.x to 7/8). The journey’s safety harness is automated testing, which makes sure the application continues to function in the new setting. DevOps leaders even suggest moving workloads to the cloud and containerizing legacy apps to enable automated pipelines. These actions improve automated testing by introducing infrastructure-as-code in addition to modernizing infrastructure.

Shift to Constant Quality (TestOps)

Instead of treating tests as a release-time task, many organizations now treat them as long-term assets. The creation of version-controlled test environments, suites, and even test data has made it possible to test outdated PHP systems reliably for years. More businesses are adopting continuous delivery nowadays. Testing occurs continuously rather than at the end of modern DevOps pipelines. Continuous testing includes QA automation at every stage of development. Legacy projects are beginning to catch up. Teams update their legacy PHP apps with smaller, more frequent releases using automated tests to stay current. To guarantee that regressions appear right away, this often entails creating CI pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab, etc.) that execute PHPUnit or Selenium suites on each commit.

Competitive Customers’ Expectations

Nowadays, customers expect e-commerce websites and online portals to be responsive, fast, and free of bugs. Failed checkouts and broken links are unacceptable, even for PHP websites that are decades old. On Cyber Monday, a retailer cannot afford a malfunctioning shopping cart, but they can afford the occasional push of code. Automated testing guarantees that obsolete cart scripts won’t break when a new product or payment gateway is added. Service providers and retailers can swiftly innovate (for example, by launching a new mobile portal or payment option) without disrupting current workflows or sacrificing user experience thanks to automated end-to-end testing. Automated regression suites verify that previously added features still work. They are frequently made with Selenium or the Magento Functional Testing Framework. Experts in e-commerce concur that automated testing helps developers manage legacy code in Magento stores by ensuring that updates won’t break important features.

ROI and Efficiency

Belitsoft’s QA specialists claim that test automation speeds up release cycles and improves time-to-market by reducing testing time and effort. In a similar vein, industry data shows that the majority of businesses recover their investment; for example, approximately 60% of Belitsoft clients report significant quality improvements following automated testing. Over a year, early bug detection leads to fewer emergency patches and more resources for the development of new features.