Remember when test automation was being peddled as a silver bullet for testing bugbears? Of course, those vendors really meant test execution automation. Automating test execution was going to increase coverage, minimize testing time, and overall reduce the amount of money being spent on testing. It would even butter your toast in the morning.

Well, those days are long gone. Organizations have now reckoned with implementing test automation and have grown wise to their challenges. They’ve discovered that automating one process within testing leaves many others untouched while introducing many challenges of its own. As an industry, we’ve been left questioning.

Below, I’ll consider some of these questions, before considering how some of the ‘intelligent’ solutions being proposed today might lead us down a similar path to the ‘magic’ of test automation. I’ll then set out some questions that we need to ask ourselves before adopting our next best solution, indicating some answers. To see these answers (both technologies and techniques) in practice, join me on November 10th for The broken promise of test automation: why are we still hand-cranking tests?

#devops #performance #machine learning #artificial intelligence #test automation #qa #quality assurance #continuous testing #intelligent testing