Things change fast.
I’d like to think my time was fairly optimised before, 60 percent of my time on actual discovery and learning focused testing. I’d rather that was 80.
Here are a few things I feel I going to continue to do more of.
Automation - the ROI in many cases was not there before but now in a few hours I’m getting some basic health check level coverage automated.
Developer tools IDE usage. I can interrogate the code, ask a about root cause a risk I have found with hands on testing for more insight at code level, even its it to assess a feature for risks directly.
Vibe coding tools to run testing experiments. Clone the source code and add mutants so I can test how good my automated health check actually is. Often as a tester I think oh I could do with a simple tool to help me test something better, I suspect I’ll explore this more.
Information repository agents, yes I could sit with the designer or the developer with my bucket load of questions but this provides a potential other option to gather the information i need.
Research, questioning and generating risk hypothesis. Empowering more and deeper testing.
So in the above I have focused on doing more and deeper testing which I feel will also in time come with its own natural efficiency boost.
I am wary of faster and cheaper goals, they seem currently a bit more suited if my activities had leaned more to mechanical strength ones but that was rarely the case so my focus has been on more and not less.
I caveat this, my role and contribution is often way off mainstream and faster and cheaper may end up losing sight of the value of the model I work in, that risk has always been there but there will definitely a few more angles to this on the horizon.