Many software quality engineers (SQE) give a little shudder when they hear the term ‘AI’, associating it with potential job loss. Today’s testing and software quality assurance (SQA) industry relies on a human workforce to manage tasks such as manually-driven exploratory testing and to create automated functional tests. The promise and potential of AI, namely its ability to overhaul manual tasks with greater speed and efficiency, is why so many SQEs give it a wide berth. While nobody wants to be replaced by a bot, avoiding AI is not going to help ensure job security. In fact, SQEs who take the opposite approach and investigate how AI can turn them into super-SQEs, are giving themselves a solid competitive edge.

Nadine du Toit, Chief Services & Innovation Officer at Inspired Testing, says that advances in the application of AI in software testing simply can’t be ignored.

“AI helps to reshape the future world that we know and work within today,” says Nadine. “AI-enabled software can superpower your real-world business by enabling intelligent automation to oversee repetitive tasks and optimise processes. This enables your human workforce to focus on customer relationships, solve complex problems, make fast, smart decisions and deliver exceptional work. AI put to good use really does give a business a solid competitive advantage.” 

Inspired Testing invites you to learn from its journey into AI

At this year’s AI Expo Africa, Sastri Munsamy from the Technology and Innovation team at Inspired Testing will present a sneak peek into findings from the global software testing company’s research and development department.

In his talk, Sastri will cover some of the current common challenges in the SQA industry such as script maintenance, test results analysis, defect classification and automated exploratory testing -  and discuss how AI can help resolve them.

“Today’s leading software testing and SQA tools like Selenium and ReportPortal have started integrating elements of AI technology with exciting results,” says Sastri. “At Inspired Testing, we’ve had a lot of fun testing and trialling these tools, among others, and have found a number of important benefits – not to mention learnt a lot of valuable lessons – that could be of great interest to our peers.”

Sastri’s advocacy for AI in SQA is underpinned by his extensive experience of real-world testing and automation projects. His expertise and enthusiasm on the subject of integrating elements of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence and machine learning to create AI empowered testing tools that will help supercharge the SQA industry is well worth hearing.

“At Inspired Testing, we have a very clear vision for the future of SQA,” says Sastri. “We see an AI empowered human workforce that is able to deliver results faster and more efficiently. Imagine SQEs able to test at the speed of DevOps with little reliance on technical skills because they have a bot assistant doing all the grunt work. We’ve still got some way to go before realising this vision but we are making enormous headway in unlocking the benefits of meaningful AI driven automation in software testing.”

AI Expo Africa is a three day live online event that runs from the 7-9 September 2021. Sastri Munsamy will present his talk: Behind the scenes of Inspired Testing’s journey into AI on Wednesday 8 September at 11:30am.