Automation or better to say, AI in its usable form, is mostly seen as a potential threat to the jobs that are traditionally performed by human beings. People always think that if machines can use their own intelligence to do things much more efficiently than manual workers, companies will eventually have no need for spending huge amounts of money on hiring and retaining human resources. But, the truth is that the actual scenario is most opposite to that image of the human workforce and we will dive into the depth of that reality in this article.
You are most likely to be at least familiar with the basic definition of artificial intelligence. However, we are providing a brief introduction here. Artificial intelligence is the definitional name of the intelligence that machines are programmed with. That means if any machine can think about various parameters regarding a situation and make a decision by itself, its power of thinking is called artificial intelligence.
Today, artificial intelligence is no longer just a futuristic term. It is being used on a large scale in numerous fields. For example, you often enjoy the voice search feature on YouTube, tell the voice assistants like Google Assistant, Alexa, and Siri to perform a lot of tasks, and they understand your voice commands and act accordingly. But, most of us rarely try to figure out how the applications perform those tasks in such an amazing way. That’s the power of artificial intelligence.
However, here we are focused on the use of artificial intelligence in software testing. In the article “Best AI in Automated Software Testing Tools”, you have already seen how advanced test automation tools like Preflight efficiently use awesome AI technologies to provide a remarkable testing experience.
Now, while those amazing AI-based testing features perform beyond imagination, a doubt often occurs that as the use of artificial intelligence significantly improves the overall efficiency of application testing, it will eventually lead to the extinction of manual testers and there will be no jobs for Quality Assurance professionals or relevant positions. But, we are here to discuss the truth about it and it clearly draws a completely opposite scenario.
The primary step of the domination of machines was automation. Since its inception, it has been going through constant upgrades with the objective of completing more tasks in less time. It has involved massive use of machines in the workplace so that the overall efficiency of the work improves. And, automation has actually been on its track towards success.
However, as a result of using automation in various important sectors has reduced human professionals from a number of jobs and even a lot of jobs got transformed. But, AI is not the final nail to the coffin of the manual workforce. Rather it encourages the manual workers to learn new skills and opens up the dimensions of new job roles.
Also, Artificial intelligence has triggered the fear of the unknown at some points. It enables computers and other devices to think & make decisions based on huge data sets and efficient programs but, most AI models still cannot be explained by even the data scientists who created them. That can certainly result in unknown and unpredictable consequences in various situations.
That points to the fact that AI can be a blessing, but it must be known and controllable, and that’s what we are going to look at in further sections.
The apparent idea about AI somehow shows a tendency that it might eat up the requirement for QA professionals and software can perform all the testing works by itself. But, the reality is not like that and we have jotted it down below.
AI can never completely replace manual testing and we really mean this statement. Even if you see past stats, test automation could not completely demolish the need for manual testing. For example, when you need to recreate the steps to trigger a bug, manual testing is the best or better to say, the only suitable way to do that. Also, you have seen how test automation underperforms in progression testing or exploratory testing. And, as far as AI-based testing is concerned, it has evidently shown its incompatibility with one-off testing approaches because of its working method that is completely based on learning by repetition, and it's the same reason that makes the use of AI improper for all the manual testing dominated aspects mentioned above.
This point is triggered by the fact that writing a test script and planning or designing a test case is not the same. A developer can easily write a test script or it can also be done by a test automation tool that uses AI to generate the code for the steps in the test. But, how will it be decided which steps should be there in the test or how should it proceed? That decision is made based on the users’ actions on the application. Only an expert with good knowledge and understanding of tests can analyze the users' actions on the functionalities of the app and go on with planning & designing the test cases.
AI is here to help you improve your productivity, not to get rid of your testing job. So, if you have a team of expert QA engineers, you are not supposed to get rid of their positions. You just need to make them learn some new skill sets. And, if you are a QA engineer, your job is not going anywhere. You just need to focus on learning some new skills that are more contemporary, efficient, and futuristic.
As AI works based on huge sets of data, it is amazing at understanding the elements of a new product that needs to be tested, and it can help you create the tests. But, if the expertise of pro QA engineers is added to the power of AI, the overall outcome will become remarkable. That’s why advanced AI-based test automation tools like Preflight allow you to use your expertise in creating tests as you want while helping you with countless intelligent features at every stage.
As we mentioned throughout the article, advanced AI-based test automation tools like Preflight use AI to help you in the testing works but, it doesn’t snatch complete control of your test suite from your hands. It provides you with the support of AI along with its amazing features to let you experience the following advantages -
If you don’t know already, Preflight has the best context awareness capabilities that use high-level AI technologies like Computer vision, OCR, etc. to intelligently identify the elements on the app that you are testing. Then you can perform the possible user actions on those elements, and Preflight will automatically record & save the actions to create the most efficient tests out of them.
It is never going to be like you have created your tests once and then you have to do nothing with them. Based on various parameters, you often have to make changes to your tests and, the best part about using Preflight is that you can edit your tests whenever you want. Preflight’s AI will easily adapt to those changes and provide you with the best results.
As you know, Preflight is a low-code/no-code testing tool, it allows anyone from your product team to create, run, and manage complex tests regardless of their coding knowledge. Though test automation functionalities are the main players working behind the scenes, AI has a massive role in improving the quality and efficiency of those test cases.
This is another remarkable feature that Preflight is praised for. Though our main objective is demolishing the coding works from testing, we also understand that you may need to add some custom codes to bring out the best testing experience. That’s why Preflight allows you to add some custom JavaScript code to your tests while our AI will figure out how to put them to the best use.
This article clearly tells you that no matter how much AI dominated the software testing domain, there will always remain requirements for expert QA engineers to -
Being one of the most renowned AI-based test automation tools, Preflight always prioritizes the contribution of the whole product team to work collaboratively for bringing out the best test results. You can know more about the amazing software testing benefits that this advanced tool provides from the article “10 Amazing Software Testing Benefits From Preflight In 2022”.
You can get yourself a truly codeless testing experience just by booking a demo. For more information, feel free to reach out to us and check out our website. Also, if you love to get the latest updates about testing technologies, do visit our blog page.