Why the Human Element of Testing Is Essential
Humans are necessary for boosting application quality, even as AI and other technologies can prove the logic functions as designed. Customers are human and humans are not governed by, nor do they act purely based on, logic. Human beings are creative critical thinkers, adapting to situations and making decisions often on the fly.
Software testing techniques and processes are moving towards combining the speed and scalability of AI with the human qualities of judgment, creativity and non-logical thinking. AI will continue to secure a place in software testing because it can provide improved test automation and complete repetitive testing tasks quickly.
But quality software testing requires the human element because end users are human. Read on to learn more about the inescapable human factors necessary in software testing to provide positive user experiences and build business value.
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The irreplaceable human element
Human software testers are still necessary for their ability to apply critical thinking and create tests for complex functionality or non-standard customer workflows. The human tester’s role is changing to become part tester and part auditor of AI testing and results. Ultimately, human testers must judge the quality of the application’s functionality based on how customers use it. Human testers help emphasize a user-centric testing focus that provides a positive customer experience as well as increases sales and customer loyalty.
Despite all it can do to speed up development and testing, AI is limited. AI cannot perceive nuances, exercise intuition or ensure applications function with societal expectations or norms in mind. As AI continues to evolve, development and software testing responsibilities will shift. Human software testers are becoming the essential safety net to prevent AI systems from causing harm or violating expected ethical standards.
Software testers must learn how to collaborate with AI, not avoid it. AI technology should be seen as an ally or team member that handles routine and data-intensive tasks within testing. At the same time, human testers should expand their creativity and exploratory testing techniques. Focus on testing the user experience and exposing complex or corner case issues. Additionally, human testers must act as an auditor to keep AI testing results reliable and trustworthy. A human tester’s true value is how they think, adapt and respond to how a system performs. Remember that humans-in-the-loop are key to validating AI workflows, providing oversight and giving feedback, all to improve accuracy, safety and decision-making
Human testing techniques and processes
Software testers will need to perform extensive auditing and analysis of AI output and logic. It’s not a simple transition, but it raises the business value of software testing exponentially. Traditionally, the role of testers was to identify defects based on executing test cases against the application functionality. Additionally, testers typically develop their own tests and execute them.
Companies using AI to perform all of these repetitive tasks are freeing up human software testers to explore complex application scenarios, perform risk analysis and evaluate AI operations during testing. Along with changes to their roles, testers will see changes in testing techniques and testing processes. For example, human-in-the-loop testing ensures that a human reviews the output of AI tools for accuracy.
As testers work to validate complex and adaptive workflows, the value of performing exploratory testing will rise and become an essential software testing skill. Testers might develop formal test scripts that move sequentially step by step, or by using a descriptive “tour” of the functionality. Exploratory tests often serve as checklists for each element of functionality, validating that it exists and works as expected.
The opportunity currently exists to make a mark in the software testing industry by developing credible, accurate and useful types of test techniques for validating AI logic. Remember to plan on testing inputs, outputs, data, security, compliance, and for ethics and compliance irregularities.
User-centric testing and AI technology
The key to successful testing with AI is basing tests on understanding a human customer and their expectations. Companies might choose to invest in AI tools for development to support coding and test automation. AI tools for QA can create test cases, execute regression testing and provide rapid testing feedback for test results.
But for all AI can do, it can’t replace the need to put the customer at the forefront as a true top priority. Human testers should expect to place a clear focus on boosting customer satisfaction across a wide and diverse set of potential customers. Testers should increase their knowledge of how end users of all types use the application and their current and future expectations. They should work alongside customer support personnel and product management to learn details about customer usage and satisfaction metrics.
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User-centric focus through crowdtesting
Delivering exceptional digital experiences starts with understanding your audience. But how do you scale that understanding? Crowdtesting elevates traditional quality assurance by injecting real human perspectives into your development pipeline, matching your application with experienced testers sourced directly based on specific customer personas or known user traits. This approach puts human crowdtesters at the center of evaluating your application. They can generate invaluable customer feedback that reflects real-world usage to drive superior design and development choices.
Applause is the leader in the crowdtesting space, providing fully managed, community-based testing solutions that harness the power of our global community of over 1 million digital experts and end users. This immense scale allows Applause to quickly assemble and customize a team of testing professionals around the world — over 200 countries and territories — building expertise tailored to even the most niche requirements.
Leveraging this unparalleled coverage lets you quickly discover how your application performs across an ever-expanding variety of geographic locations, networks, languages, devices and operating systems. By partnering with Applause, you receive detailed, actionable insights and real-time results, helping you to reduce friction points, increase conversion rates, accelerate innovation and release faster, with confidence.
Additionally, Applause offers fully managed AI training and testing solutions that leverage that global community to source the diverse, high-quality data needed to train models effectively. Training can include collecting millions of voice utterances, images or text entries to help ensure algorithms learn from real-world variance rather than synthetic approximations. They also offer red teaming, where teams of experts and generalists actively test models to uncover bias, toxicity and hallucinations before they reach the public. By injecting authentic human feedback into the loop — from reinforcement learning to safety evaluations — Applause helps promote AI experiences that customers love.
The bottom line is that human testing and evaluation remains necessary to ensure a user-centric development and testing focus. AI tools can scale to perform repetitive data-heavy tasks and manage a large number of testing tasks. Human testers can provide value by testing complex test scenarios and finding issues in corner cases. Count on a combination of AI tools and human creativity to build an application that functions accurately and still meets users’ needs.
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