Role of human intellect in QA

(In this SmartBits, Sudhir Patnaik outlines “Role of human intellect in QA“.  The video is at the end of this blog)

The way artificial intelligence and machine learning is coming into play, there will be a time where a developer doesn’t need to write code. It would be more like telling the chatbot, the business logic and it spits out the code. In fact, to some extent it is happening today, where the template code is ready and one needs to just plug in the business code.

Even in the testing world someday automation is going to be so intelligent where one just point at the software to the URL and it captures everything. There is no need for human intervention and it self-corrects whenever the things change in the website or URL.
Sometimes when we refer to test automation, we unfortunately focus only on UI automation, whereas a big piece of the world actually is platform automation because companies are transforming themselves to be known as platform organizations in the world. There is more technology on the platform side.

The human interface on the UI side will minimize itself and this is where the transformation of the shift is focusing more on the backend side. The front end is going to be driven through intelligent systems mostly. Our intervention as quality engineers on front-end side will get minimized over a period of time.

It is not easy for any computer system or whatever system one builds to understand the piece of code and magically write a unit test code. One can understand the code, can write the computer systems, can write positive and negative test cases, but that may be about 50% of the coverage; the remaining 50% of the coverage on the code still comes from humans. That is where the intellect is still needed. No chatbots can take over.