26 Nov
This post briefly summarizes insights into scientific research that indicate that “Unit Testing will be about AI in the future”.
Software Testing has always been a fundamental aspect of research in the area of computer science, and software engineering in particular. With the huge advances in the last decades, a lot of options have been exploited, and challenges have been solved. However, software testing is still a tedious and time-consuming effort in every software project. Therefore, additional effort is needed to improve software testing. Or even more: a revolution is required, as current techniques have often already reached their limits.
Artificial Intelligence has shown to revolutionize a large number of areas in the preceding years, such as driving, photographing, and human-computer-interaction in general.
Therefore, more and more research focuses on the Integration of AI into Software Testing, with the aim to make software testing about AI in the future. The goal here is to let an Artificial Intelligence help testers and software engineers with tasks that currently cannot be automated, because a certain degree of human “intelligence” and creativity is required, and automate all underlying steps that are tedious and repetitive.
This is reflected not only by the growing number of publications that apply AI techniques to Software Testing (see also “AI and Unit Testing – What I learned from 3 years of research“), but also by the scientific platforms that are made for research on the integration of AI and Testing.
- The most prestigious conference on software engineering worldwide, namely the “International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), hosts a dedicated workshop on the synergies between Deep Learning and Software Testing (DeepTest (1)) since 2019, and hosts a co-located conference on “Automation of Software Testing” since 2020 (2).
- In 2021, a dedicated worshop on “Artificial Intelligence in Software Testing” will be held at the “International Conference on Software Testing (ICST)”, the most prestigious conference on software testing globally (3)
- Since 2019, there is an independently held annual conference on “Artificial Intelligence and Software Testing (AITest)” (4)
What is your opinion on the integration of AI and Testing?
Do you want to read more “Science says” posts?
Let me know in the comments section below.
written by Daniel Lehner
Daniel Lehner is a PhD student at the Johannes Keppler University in Linz, Austria. His research focus is on traceability of software information between different stages in the development cycle. During his master studies in Business Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology, Daniel worked as a consultant in the area of software quality assurance.
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Daniel Lehner