AI is eating the world. You may have heard of self-driving cars or automated stock market trading bots, but there is another area where AI is having a monumental impact: software testing.
This article will explain some of the many benefits of using AI to enhance your software testing processes. These tools will transform your team into a highly functional one that can do orders of magnitude better quality work than without them. Let’s get started.
Benefits of AI in Software Testing
#1 Faster Test Creation
Most people use Selenium to create their tests. It’s a great framework, but it can take hours to make even the simplest of tests. Not only that, but you’ll have to translate that test to all the different browsers on the market. Now you have a project that could take days to complete.
If you use an AI testing framework, you create tests by clicking through the test case step-by-step. There is often no need to write any code. Now you can create tests in minutes rather than hours or days.
#2 Democratize Test Creation
AI testing frameworks are a combination of low-code and no-code tools. Using them transforms everyone in your company into a tester. Gone are the days spent creating dozens of small, simple tests others have requested. AI tools have automated this away, and so anyone can develop such tests themselves. Now your QA team can focus on the more complex tests that cannot be done with such tools.
#3 Learn from the Mistakes of Others
AI models need a vast amount of data to train. If you built your own models with your company’s data, they would be somewhat effective. But, as the saying goes, there is no data like more data. Using an AI testing framework trained on millions of tests from products in a variety of industries means these models are incredibly high performing and can make suggestions even you might not have thought of. It’s like having the power of thousands of expert developers at your fingertips.
#4 Automatically Create New Tests
Instead of writing all your tests by hand, let AI create tests automatically for you. For example, the model learns how long each page should take to load and picks an intelligent wait time before its first interaction. If the page suddenly takes longer to load, the model reports this as a failure. This is just one example of a test that AI automatically creates for your suite.
#5 Self-Healing Tests
If you use Selenium and change the name of a selector, the script either fails straight away or keeps going with the wrong element. Neither of these options is good.
AI models learn how your site is supposed to look. If an element changes or moves, it figures out what happened and selects the correct one. For example, if you move your ‘register now’ button to the bottom of the page and change the text to ‘sign up,’ it understands what you’ve done and still selects it. Even though the site changed, the test still passed without you needing to do anything, i.e., it healed itself.
#6 One-Click Fixes
If you completely remove a button or change every option in a drop-down menu, even an AI-powered test will fail. However, thanks to the millions of tests the model has been trained on, the framework realizes there is a problem and suggests possible things that may have changed. So, it presents you with a list of potential issues and solutions. All you have to do is click the correct option, and it updates the entire test for you. Say goodbye to wasting time writing similar bug-fixing code. Just one click, and you are done.
#7 Reduce Test Maintenance Time
Combining self-healing and one-click-fix tests equals a significant reduction in the amount of time spent on test maintenance. Everyone hates this, and it is the bane of every QA’s life. A QA Engineer spending hours and hours on test maintenance will be demotivated and probably look for a job elsewhere. Reducing the amount of time they spend on this task will increase their job satisfaction and result in team members who love their job and want to stay long term.
Conclusion
Testing was once a largely manual endeavor. Yes, it involved writing code, but it was brittle and error-prone as soon as anything changed in your product. But we have entered a new era: the AI era. Now everyone can write tests with little or no coding knowledge, program trading bots, or create internal tools with a help of UIbakery.io with no frontend development skills. You can set them up in minutes rather than the hours or days they used to take, you can fix broken ones in a single click, and you can do all of this while boosting the motivation of your team and increasing test coverage. All these benefits combine to make AI testing an incredible addition to your workflow.
Rajani Baburajan
