Will AI Replace QA Testers?

Darin Pope (0:00)

This episode is sponsored by Sauce Labs.

Shubha Govil (0:03)

The discussion was about how three years back in QA, everyone was saying, if you are not doing test automation, if you're not an automation engineer, your role is going to go away. Or you were saying, everyone who was live manual testing engineer, that if you are not moving to QA, test automation and not automating your pipelines, your role will go away.

Now, you can say the same thing about a test automation engineer now, because hypothesis everyone has is that AI will drive all the automation, your test automation pipeline, and there's no need for these estates in your organization.

Darin Pope (0:48)

This is DevOps Paradox, episode number 370

Will AI Replace QA Testers?

Welcome to DevOps Paradox. This is a podcast about random stuff in which we, Darren and Victor, pretend we know what we're talking about. Most of the time, we mask our ignorance by putting the word DevOps everywhere we can and mix it with random buzzwords like Kubernetes, serverless, CICD, team productivity, islands of happiness, and other fancy expressions that make us sound like we know what we're doing. Occasionally, we invite guests who do know something, but we do not do that often since they might make us look incompetent. The truth is out there and there is no way we are going to find it. Yes, it's Darren reading this text and feeling embarrassed that Victor made me do it. Here are your hosts, Darren Pope and Victor Farsi. Victor, do you think the role of QA software testers is going to exist in three years as we know it today?

Viktor Farcic (1:58)

All the roles will exist in the nearby future, and none of them will be the same.

Darin Pope (2:04)

All of them?

Viktor Farcic (2:05)

All of them. And none of them will be the same.

Darin Pope (2:08)

On today's show, we have with us Shubha Govil from Sauce Labs. Shubha, how are you doing?

Shubha Govil (2:14)

I'm doing well. Great to be on your show, Victor and Darren. This is amazing.

I must start by saying I'm probably the least DevOps-native person you have on your show.

So let's see how it goes.

Viktor Farcic (2:27)

Okay. Now we know that you haven't listened to all of the episodes.

Now we know it for certain, because if you did, you would know that you're not the least. It's physically impossible.

Darin Pope (2:40)

By the way, Victor, you haven't listened to any of them, so she's listened to more than you have.

Shubha Govil (2:44)

Probably.

Viktor Farcic (2:45)

That's true. I listened to it live while it's happening.

Darin Pope (2:49)

Back to my statement, thinking about software testers, QA, Victor says everything's still going to be there, but they're not going to be, my phrasing now, they're not going to be doing what they're doing today. Does that seem reasonable?

Shubha Govil (3:02)

So the world we are living in, and with the disruption and change that we are experiencing this industry, I actually truly believe that is the statement that we can predict, we can say that all these roles will go away or this role will change x, y, z.

However, the fact is, every minute when our teams are building great products and are thinking about how to solve the problems our customers have, there are many roles each of them are playing. So I'm going to put a slightly different hypothesis here. And my hypothesis is that, yes, all of the roles will exist and change, but also each of us will play many different roles. A little bit coming from the product management side of the role, that's where I have been in my career all along. Product management is not same as it was three years back, or as it was six years back, or even 20 years back when I started, when there were no product managers in the industry. That role was mostly a program manager or project manager. Now QA teams at that time had a very prominent role, being a separate organization, defining how the quality of product looks like. And their role has since evolved every few years as well. So just this morning, I was having discussion with one of the industry analysts, and the discussion was about how three years back in QA, everyone was saying, if you are not doing test automation, if you're not an automation engineer, your role is going to go away. Or you were saying, everyone who was live manual testing engineer, that if you are not moving to QA test automation and not automating your pipelines, your role will go away.