In some industries, artificial intelligence seems cause for optimism – not alarm – according to a recent report done by Idera that looks at the impact of AI on Quality. Judy Bossi, VP of Product Management at Idera, explains how AI is reshaping the future of QA, common barriers to AI adoption, and what’s needed to move forward with new technology.

Michelle: Can you tell us a little bit more about the research and the top risks?

Judy: Of course. So the test rail AI and QA report, we recently published this industry report. We wanted to survey testing, software testing professionals to get their take on AI. AI has been talked about so recently lately, but what we've found is that AI is not just a buzzword. It's truly being embraced and adopted across the software testing industries. It was really interesting to dig into the data to understand, you know, what do people exactly think about AI? Are people using AI already? If so, in what ways? And as we look to the future, What sort of opportunities do we see in this industry and within the software testing career?

Michelle: There was a section that talked about challenges. Could you address those and see what is kind of holding the other people back?

Judy: So I was first surprised to see that so many people are already using AI, 65% of respondents and we had over 2000 respondents. 65% are already using AI, 94% are seeing somewhat or significant improvement in productivity. So that's a good thing. But when it comes to challenges, there definitely are a few that some we were surprised to see, others we were not. So despite 65% already using AI, 54% are still uncertain about the benefits. What is the biggest hurdle to adoption? 53% said data privacy and security issues. This of course is not a surprise. We know that with the way AI is evolving as a practice, how data is used and how large learning model companies use data across customers, that's always been a question. And so I think especially for our software testing professionals who are working in regulated industries or even just enterprise companies in general, what they want to make sure is that before they adopt AI, they want to make sure their data is protected and sound and not going to be reused as training data with other customer data.

Yeah, I thought the AI optimism was also pretty surprising. There, like the report mentioned, you know, in the news, it's more negative, but within industry, people are, I guess, more optimistic since they are seeing benefits already and using it now. So yes, yes. I think there is a lot of optimism overall. You know, I was surprised to see as well that the majority of testers and their usage of AI is primarily using chat GPT.

96% of respondents said that how they use AI is primarily in the form of chat GBT. And so what this means is that there's a slew of AI related software testing products that are in the market that really aren't being leveraged yet. You know, tools like apply tools, certain Selenium plugins, even AI powered test automation tools like Functionize.

These purpose built for QA tools are not really high on the list when it comes to what tools are you using for AI. And what that tells me is that, you know, the QA tools industry is still relatively immature in tooling. I think that software testers may not be aware that these tools are out there. And maybe that's preventing them from adopting these tools for long-term use.

But I think, you know, when we think about the future and how software testers can really enhance their day to day activities, it's really time to try these tools themselves, right? ChatGPT is really just a small sliver of what's truly possible using AI. And so I think as the months and years go on, I'm hoping that software testers, especially those that are not using any AI yet, or even those that are only using tools like ChatGPT can start to investigate, evaluate, and try out some of the AI-powered software testing tools in the market. Yeah, definitely. That was surprising. There were so many tools and there's a clear leader there. So, yeah, it's interesting.