AI and the future of QA

Jyoti Prasad (JP) March-2019

CEO - ImpactQA

AI – A key trend in IT Evolution of QA The AI handshake

The rise of AI is becoming a Some years ago traditional QA Testers will have to unlearn
disruptive force in the was replaced by automation and relearn new ways of doing
testing landscape and in future AI will change QA as they rendezvous with
the way QA is performed machines.

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The role of testers is changing from mere ‘defect

finders’ to someone who can bring value to the
business outcome and be an enabler of customer
satisfaction. With AI and ML in the scene, testing will
eventually become more experimental, more thought
provoking, and more mathematical.

In the 1800’s industrial revolution, machines replaced manual jobs and that
resulted in a better quality of life. At the same time, it also led to the loss of Key trends driving
jobs and unemployment skyrocketed in the short term. However, the
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
IT Today
revolution, that the world has come to terms AI is at the forefront of the
with, will be significantly different from the
technology landscape along
Industrial Revolution. AI and ML will provide
QA professionals to work in tandem with with IoT and Blcokchain.
machines and will help us improve the quality The convergence of AI, ML
of our products.
and analytics along with
AI has been around for many years with highs and lows in terms of public their use in carrying out
interest. However, in recent years, it has propelled to the forefront thanks smarter and faster
to increasing power of hardware and infrastructure and the interest by big
players (FAANG stocks). There is a lot of enthusiasm and excitement about AI automation will be the
technologies but their application in software testing is still emerging. biggest disruptive force that
Questions are being raised if AI will bring ‘doom’ to the testers community will transform the way QA
and will AI perform all testing in near future. The
will be perceived and
We look at some of the nuances of AI and its impact on QA and Software performed in the years to
Testing in this whitepaper.
come.
According to a survey from Micro Focus (World Quality Report – 2018-
19), 57% of respondents said they had projects involving the use of AI
for QA and Testing already in place or planned in 2019 going into 2020
Evolution of Testing
At the turn of the century Internet was a luxury. I
remember using a dial up 56 kbps connection at my
apartment in Irvine, California. Those were the days
when iPhone or iPads did not exist and Google had
just raised an IPO. Uber, Lyft did not exist neither did
the Airbnbs or Snapchats of the world. In the last 15
years things have evolved and so has the way
software is designed, developed and tested.
The origin of testing…
The role of a tester was to come in towards the end
of SDLC (remember waterfall days?). By the time
tester got hold of the application to be tested, the
underlying business requirements would have got
changed or may not have been relevant at all. Testing
was considered an after-thought.
Agile knocks the door…
Testers were now integral part of team and they were
introduced early in the process. Agile made 2-week
development a norm and testing was no longer an
exercise that took months. Agile Testing replaced
Classic Testing. Agile became a big thing quickly
while XP, Scrum, Kanban became a standard process
in the SDLC. Many Agile Project Management tools
(open source) like JIRA came into existence.
Achieving the scale and Continuous Testing
This decade so far has been ‘about scale’, how to
write tests fast and find bugs faster. Digital
Transformation gathered steam few years ago and
Crowd Testing, Testing on cloud, DevOps became
commonplace. Today a vast majority of the
organizations are looking at constant delivery and
constant testing (in fact Facebook does multiple code
push in production every single day thanks to
automated CI & CD and continuous testing)
DevOps and Agile adoption continue to develop driven
by the ‘need for speed ‘ flexibility and agility.
The future of QA…
Future of QA will be about Automated Testing using
Machine Learning and AI. The key objective will be to
achieve “Quality at Speed’.
The new QA techniques that will be used will be
around ‘Model based Testing’, predictive analysis,
robotic and cognitive automation. This means that we
are very close to a future where it will be possible to
start analyzing log files (by predictive analysis and
model building capabilities) and gaining a perspective
on a piece of code prior to being ready to be tested.
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AI has come knocking at the door and is giving QA
a whole new spin
And it is coming fast at us. AI is, and will
disrupt the way we live the world today.
From self-driving cars to detecting life
threatening diseases in the very early
stages, AI will soon start correcting code
as the developers write it.
Why AI makes sense for testing
The main problem with today’s QA lies in
the sheer amount of data that testers
need to handle in a limited period of
time they usually have. Imagine testing
thousands of regression test cases (even
if they are automated) that can take
hours and sometime days, and that kind
of time is not a luxury today. Since
clients have become further more
demanding and impatient in a sense,
traditional testing methods often cannot
keep up with them. This often takes
traditional testing methods out of the
equation and calls for a more pertinent
approach. That is, the one powered by AI
- artificial intelligence, ML - machine
learning and predictive analytics.
What challenges will AI address?
Industries like testing will advance with
the help of AI and ML. A time consuming
task for a human to do is easy for a
machine or computer to do.
There are AI algorithms that can be
written today that in real-time, analyze
all the DOM objects of a page and
extract the objects and its properties.
The AI can then decide the best location
strategy to locate a particular element
based on this analysis. Even if a
developer amends the attribute of an
element, the test still continues to run
and that leads to more stable tests. As a
result, the authoring and execution of
automated tests will be much faster and
more stable.
Machine learning and predictive analytics go hand in hand in software testing and QA today
Leave it to the machine – no more human interventions
Just like automation tools of today, AI will
replace the mundane tasks like visual
reviews (that are basic checks and testers
get bored doing it again and again and may
tend to overlook). Following are some
areas where AI and ML will make a
difference.
• AI will help replace a lot of manual
testing and skills that are hard to
find.
• AI/ML will help learn and optimize
our tests. It will learn from data in
your existing QA systems (source
code repo, logging defects,
resolutions, test cases etc.) to
help discover problem areas in the
product.
• AI can traverse a lot number of
paths (previously not traversed) in
seconds and learn it and over a
period of time and will alert
testers if they find anything
suspicious.
• AI/ML will be able to predict the
probability of a build failing if and
when the code changes are made
to the application.
• AI will help scale the tests. Tests
will be written faster and failures
would be found fast helping
project teams put a release in
production faster and efficient.
While AI will address these challenges, AI-
driven QA will have its own challenges.
Mining of data from ALM tools (test
coverage, defect logs, test cases
executions, production data and code
coverage) will be an issue not just the
quantity but also the quality side of the
house. Skills of resources will also be an
issue and testers will have to bring new
skills into the mix.
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What AI would not be able to do?
“AI and ML will bring
Unlike what we see in sci-fi movies, machines and
algorithms will never be able to replace a human brain man and machine
(at least it doesn’t look like it will happen in
immediate future). Things like creativity, empathy and
together in future and
domain knowledge will still be very close to ‘humans’ will help bring
than to the ‘machines’.
‘quality at speed’.
Also, review of results spewed out by machines will
still have to be done by humans/testers. ML and AI are
testing enablers and testers will move up the value
chain, from doing mundane tasks to analyzing results
that requires creativity and ‘human intelligence’.

Will AI replace testers?

AI will certainly not completely replace the manual testers but it will definitely change the way manual testing
is performed.

Testers would need to constantly evolve with technology and acquire various skills in order to build and
maintain AI test suites that test AI-based products. This will involve data science skills; understanding of some
deep learning principles, concepts of algebra and basic understanding of languages like Python and R.

A word of caution: Testers who would hide their heads in sand and think that what they do is unique and
cannot be replaced, make no mistake: AI is coming like a massive asteroid that slammed into earth and wiped
a complete race of dinosaurs; so be prepared and brace for the Impact.

Summary
The testing community will see a lot of use of data and automation in the next few years. AI and its use in QA are still
at its infancy and a lot of trial and error will happen before it matures and takes a recognizable shape. There is no
doubt that it is an exciting time for testers who are witnessing a technology revolution around them. This AI revolution
would definitely result in faster rollout of quality products at speed.

Just the way some years ago testing became an integral part of SDLC, AI-in-QA will become a norm during the entire
lifecycle - from requirements gathering to design through UI/UX. Exciting times ahead.

Overall, exciting times ahead for QA and testing world!

ImpactQA provides QA Engineering solutions including Functional, Automation, Performance, UI/UX, Security, AI, Digital Testing and DevOps to Fortune 500
firms and leading startups around the globe. To know more visit us at http://www.impactqa.com or write to us at services@impactqa.com

www.impactqa.com 12th FL, 597, 5th Ave, New York, 10017, USA
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