🤖 Day 30: Consider what your AI Test Buddy would do for you

30 Days of Testing
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Day 30

In my mind, this is tied to contemporary exploratory testing championed by Maaret Pyhäjärvi. We should use AI to create assistants that maximise what great testing looks like over squeezing efficiencies out of what we already do.

Concepts such as:

  • The Automation Gambit - creating an executable specification encouraging learning of how to test, be resourceful and document all at once.
  • Parameterising unit tests to maximise their value and find new information.
  • Unattended testing - generating data for a report for example, automating the data creation, changing report generation parameters and checking the output.
  • Attended testing - using logs/events/metrics to augment your exploratory testing.
  • Bug fixing - fixing bugs together with developers or fixing them yourself

Envision the Perfect Assistant

I would call it Zenko, meaning a benevolent and clever fox from Japanese folklore, that grows wiser with experience. Also, you can have a cool logo of a fox with lots of tails. Perhaps, as you learn together, more tails can be added.

With the above in mind, I would like the assistent to:

  • As one tests, build the executable specification as shown above, but be able to access the current specification as it is to suggest coverage improvements or warn about duplication.
  • Suggesting where a lower level (unit, component, integration test) covers what you are testing, or how one might expand that coverage.
  • Expose the configuration/environment variables of a system and be able to change on the fly, maybe best when testing against a locally running application.
  • Consume logs as part of the model and display snippets of them if you describe something as a bug in your notes or indicate a problem/question.
  • Suggest areas of the code where the fix for a problem might be so you can better point developers in the right location (or for you to try fix it yourself).

I think the main thing for such a tool is to look to how we can make testing better and more teachable, rather than trying to hide or automate the skilful part.

I would be one of those frustrating product owners I think with a cool idea but a very loose grasp on how to make it a reality!

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