Your computer can test better than you (and that's a good thing)
If enough marketing dollars go behind promoting a buzzword without a formal definition, it begins to lose all meaning. Ask ten developers about NoSQL, and you’ll hear eleven interpretations. Request a definition of “transactions” from database vendors, and you’ll find yourself navigating a maze of nuanced explanations. In software, clarity is often the rarest commodity.
So when I say “autonomous testing,” what comes to mind? AI-generated unit tests? I hope not. Our defense against AI code generation? For all our sakes, I hope so. Before the industry renders this buzzword as meaningless as most other software terms, let’s look closely at it and establish a clear definition.
The first two things I want to understand when learning about a new software concept are what it is and why I should care. At some point between the what and why I want to develop a clear mental model of how this concept applies to me as a developer delivering software to the real world. So, we’ll take a look at both today.
While there are plenty of ways to test software – unit testing, regression testing, smoke testing – most of these ways involve developers attempting to predict scenarios that their software will face in production. You want your software to be production-ready.
