Need of Artificial Intelligence in Software Testing

Published on October 21, 2022

Nowadays, Artificial Intelligence algorithms with various domains like IoT, Network Security, Image processing, etc. marked their footprints in various sectors by intelligently automating different kinds of processes followed in respective areas of the sector. With the invention of AI, human efforts are reduced and the efficiency of the resultant system is increased. Still, human intelligence is paramount for logical thinking and creative ideas.

In order to develop a quality product, it has to go through a Software development life cycle known as the SDLC cycle where the product is evolved step by step from requirements gathering to the maintenance phase. One of the important phases of SDLC is software testing. Software testing is the verification and validation of a product to check whether the product is satisfying user requirements to deliver a quality product. Software testing is further divided into static testing and dynamic testing.

Static testing is performed at the requirement phase through reviews, walkthroughs, and Inspections. Dynamic testing is performed through unit testing, smoke testing, regression testing, retesting, component testing, integration testing, system testing, sanity testing, and user acceptance testing on the developed part of the product or complete product.

In earlier days manual testing framework is used at most places to perform all the testing. Manual testing is a time-consuming process as the preparation of test cases and their execution is done manually in an excel sheet or JIRA framework in the case of the agile model. Also, so much repetitive work is present in this process. To overcome this Automation testing framework is introduced where test cases are automated in the form of scripts in different programming languages. An automation script is executed to run and test the product or software. Reusability and time are major advantages achieved through this testing.

Though time is saved in automation testing, some manual human efforts are needed to write the script for test cases as per the requirements mentioned in the functional requirement Specification document (FRS). AI and its branches of machine learning and deep learning are used to build the model which will be trained for mapping the requirements with the test cases and generate the script automatically as per the learnings. Human intelligence plays a very important role here to train the model by different test scenarios with all possible test cases. As the impact of AI is seen in other processes, soon we will reach the stage where it mimics exactly as humans and it will be a great contribution to the software industry.

Blog by :

Prof. Pragati Choudhari,

ICEM, Pune.

Posted in:Computer Engineering, Education