Optimize Your Testing Practices: Artificial Intelligence

We polled recent webinar attendees on their use of AI within their organization. Nearly half of respondents reported that they weren’t yet talking about AI in their organizations. Others were beginning to discuss AI for testing-related purposes, while some were using AI in other departments in their organization. Only one respondent reported using testing-related AI in their organization currently.

As one of the hottest tech topics today, AI has shown a lot of promise across a staggering array of functions. As businesses start to use AI testing tools within their technology organizations, testers can adopt these tools to help reduce manual efforts, speed up testing cycles through more efficient execution, obtain greater accuracy in testing, and free up valuable resources to focus on more strategic activities.

Using AI, testers can easily engage in UI testing, which can be tedious in large applications with a lot of screens and frequent deployments. AI tools can create a baseline of screens, flagging differences each time you run new screenshots against the existing baseline which changes a tester’s activities to reviewing findings to confirm defects instead of the laborious activity of visual, manual comparison. With respect to development, AI tools also assist in artifact generation, and can improve code maintenance by organizing and cleaning up code. AI can also help create self-healing automation. Self-healing tests use AI algorithms to locate objects that tests can no longer find because the control’s ID or location has changed.

There are many free and low-cost AI tools your organization can leverage, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT for test case writing. ChatGPT can quickly and accurately create both positive and negative test cases and can also create user stories. Testim and Zaptest are powerful tools that can be utilized throughout the SDLC, and testing professionals should explore their features.

This article is part of a series on a webinar SPR hosted. The webinar, Doing More with Less: Optimize Your Testing Practices, was presented by SPR’s Yury Lerner and Melissa McElroy. With a focus on doing more with less, topics included Shift Left, AI, Automation and Accessibility.