I’ve recently attended the National Software Testing Conference, with some really interesting talks and also conversations. Despite AI dominating the topics on stage, talking to fellow testers it is clear that our problems remain the same.
Domenico Vitale gave an incredible talk on “Building a High-Impact QA Function” and I loved his message on people then process. Issues in “testing” are really risk, feedback and decision problems. This made me reflect that in a world where we’re leveraging automation & AI to go faster and faster, the value of how we explore and discuss these problems are still essential.
The need to think was also well covered by Kiruthika Ganesan’s exploration of the brain and thinking. She highlighted how speeding things up have made it harder to have meaningful conversations. She asked do we have time to talk when everything takes seconds?
On the flip side there was talk on AI generated requirements, code and testing with human in the loop to review it but with this I ask, how are we getting the time to think about whether we’re implementing the right thing? Some of my favourite practices are built upon talking to our peers. I worry that the the push for AI & faster could lead to us skipping some of the practices that have helped us build quality software.
Shanmugapriya Sabapathy explored how AI is not a fix but an amplifier and the need to have engineering practices that are ready to adopt AI. I’ve seen similar shared by Craig Risi at Nordic Testing Days and Dan Llewyn at an Edinburgh Tech Meetup. With AI being an accelerator, if your processes have your teetering on the edge then you’re only going to go flying off a cliff.
It is important that organisations know that adopting AI isn’t about the end goal of using AI. It is about delivering with quality and without good people, practices and processes, that can’t happen. Everything that we know and understand about building quality software isn’t changing through AI. It is still People, Processes then tools. Just AI is changing the tools and tweaking processes…