Artificial Intelligence Only Works alongside Skilled Testers
When discussing the future of artificial intelligence (AI), people often think of machines replacing what humans do in the workplace. Why pay an employee when you can program a robot to do all the same tasks—and likely at an even higher success rate?
Testers might cringe hardest at the concept because more and more, it feels like the notion of “testing is dead” is traveling like wildfire. Testers are being forced to learn how to code and pick up other software skills in order to stay relevant, so why would they ever want to incorporate machines that could replace what they do?
Fortunately for testing teams, AI isn’t going to come along and make testers obsolete. Quite the contrary—the future of AI in the realm of software testing is all about what it can do to help testers, not hurt or replace them.
Jason Arbon, the CEO of Appdiff, spoke at this year’s STAREAST Conference about the future of software testing when it comes to AI. He laughed at the idea of robots taking over for humans, instead pointing to humans as the necessary factor when it comes to proper AI use.
“The thing that testers don't realize is that AI is perfectly suited to replace testing activities. The reason is, fundamentally, AI is just a way to train software or let software train itself,” Arbon explained. “If you have a bunch of input data and you have a bunch of output data, all you need is the input and the output. If you have those things, guess what you can do? Train a machine to do it. That's literally the fundamental thing about machine learning. What do testers do? They come up with test inputs.”
As a tester concerned over your job, that’s comforting to hear. Similar to automation tools, AI can make your life easier by taking over some of the more tedious tasks. And while it does take away some of your work, it still requires a strong understanding of your product and specific testing needs.
“The only question really is, how much of that data do you need to train an application or train a bot to test an application?” Arbon continued. “Really, of all the professions that's most in need of help of automation, it's also the most ripe one for automation with AI. AI is not just this mysterious thing. It's actually a really...it's a tool. It's perfectly suited I think for software testing and people are waking up to that idea generally.”
If you look at AI as the next big tool that can take your testing over the top rather than an inevitable replacement, the future of the profession becomes much brighter. Testing is changing, but for the foreseeable future, real testers still need to be closely involved.
