Focus on More Innovation, Less Automation | Virtuoso QA Blog
In AI-augmented test automation, you’d think that we would be most concerned with automating everything possible and letting AI do all the work, but that would be just automation for automation’s sake. AI is not here to take over your jobs or (unfortunately) to let you kick back with a coffee and watch the automation run. Rather, it’s enabling you to have more time to do the interesting part: innovation.
AI performs repetitive, hard skills like basic automation, math, data entry, and more, leaving humans to handle the innovation, the ideas, and the creativity. Generative AI like ChatGPT has a lot of people who code, write, and research, but currently, AI can only do what you tell it to. You have to give it a story prompt or an outline to go from, and if you asked generative AI to do it for you, it’s not going to churn it out perfectly. The longer a generated story is, the more it loses cohesiveness and contradicts itself. Ok the point is, AI is not capable of complete automation.
With test automation, AI might run the tests, but you have to write them and tell the AI how to perform them and how to handle failures. For example, one Christmas we updated the logo on our website, and every test flagged a visual regression, lighting the dashboard up like a Christmas tree (joke totally intended). Our AI and ML need the testers to tell them when a failure is an actual test failure rather than an intended change. So, what is the point of AI other than automation?
AI deals with the small stuff so you can work on answering the big questions. You can employ your soft skills like critical thinking, innovation, and creativity instead of doing repetitive tasks. What these tasks look like depends on the industry, but for testers, there’s more time to work on analysis and presenting the product owner with a more complete picture of the state of the application. Testers that run manual tests themselves can find themselves scrambling to finish them on time so the product can be released regardless of whether it’s truly ready to release or not.
At Virtuoso, we want to empower you (whether you’re a tester, a manager, a product owner, or a dev) to spend less time working on the repetitive tasks and collecting data and more time deciding what to do with that data. You can set up your tests quickly with Natural Language Programming so you can get to the good stuff. But we wouldn’t want to choke your creativity, so we have a Dev Mode where you can edit the code so the tests perform exactly as you tell them to with no hacky workarounds. Book a demo with our expert team and see how you can get set up in fifteen minutes!