Today, I see more and more ads promising to generate tests automatically. I don’t believe in all these promises because:
Earlier, we referred to automated test generation as a model-based approach. We had a formal model and then a generator that produced the required tests. Now, ads claim that these tests can be automatically generated from the UI with the help of AI. However, this can’t work because even humans struggle to generate tests from the UI. Humans need requirements to understand how the UI should function. Therefore, tests generated solely from the UI will be meaningless. What will they test? These tests will only result in significant maintenance costs and prevent the nightly build system from running useful tests.
In the future, I expect new reverse engineering tools that can create or update requirements from the code base. If we have these automatically created requirements, which are validated by humans, we will be able to create valuable automated tests using AI.
Now, AI can provide us with tools that help us avoid technical aspects, allowing us humans to focus more on domain logic.
Your passionate tester, Andreas Hollmann
