New Model for Testing
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2024-09-24
6:15PM-7:30PM EST
Online Event - ZOOM
Paul Gerrard
Paul Gerrard is a consultant, teacher, author, webmaster, programmer, tester, conference speaker, rowing coach and publisher. He has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of software testing and quality assurance, specializing in test assurance. He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at testing conferences across Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and occasionally won awards for them.
Educated at the universities of Oxford and Imperial College London, he is a Principal of Gerrard Consulting Limited.
In 2010 he won the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award and in 2013 he won the inaugural TESTA Lifetime Achievement Award. He won the ISTQB Testing Excellence Award in 2018.
He is currently involved in building AI services for two startups and interested in how AI can help but also how best to evaluate AI supported systems.
Join Paul Gerrard as he discusses his New Model for Testing.
The hype surrounding AI and machine learning is at its peak. ChatGPT, launched publicly at the end of 2022, now has 180m subscribers and dominates the airwaves, but there are now hundreds of publicly available large-language models (LLMs) and open-source AI tools available for you to experiment with.
Companies are scrambling to incorporate AI into their software products - Microsoft Copilot is the AI component in 365 used by 400m users. Test tool vendors are no exception. Every test tool now seems to have AI added in some form. Vendors have found opportunities to use AI - mostly LLMs - to introduce, enhance or speed up various features in their products.
These enhancements are mostly ad-hoc or opportunistic improvements to, cynically, 'catch the wave.' There are some speculative, lifecycle, visionary or proof-of-concept products emerging, but there is no guarantee they will become the standard. There is no overall vision of what AI could do for test engineers.
Paul has always argued that the users of testing products should be setting the agenda for test tool vendors, or we will get what vendors can build not what we need.
He uses his New Model for Testing - a model of tester thought processes - to set out functional areas that best support our thinking. If AI is to be an intelligent and productive assistant, it needs to be in tune with how we approach the problem of testing. This talk argues that testers will never get what they want unless they steer vendors away from test execution-is-all attitudes and articulate their true needs.
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