Artificial Intelligence is making giant strides in performing tasks that were once reserved for human beings. From self-driving cars to defeating humans in strategy games, AI is a game changer. The primary driver of this change is the success of deep learning algorithms made possible largely by the generation of a large amount of consumer behavior and activity data and the availability of big data technologies and processing power at lower costs. We are already seeing some implementations of AI which can inspect requirements, develop code, detect bugs, and provide fixes for the same. Will this make jobs as a software developer and tester obsolete? Well, based on my extensive experience in software testing and automation, it doesn’t seem like this will necessarily be the case.
Even with all the developments in AI, there is still the silver lining that our biological neural network is eons ahead of the artificial one. We are still far from achieving a generalized AI and our human brain still outperforms almost all the tasks currently being automated by AI. Artificial intelligence, just like our previous efforts of automation, is going to affect all kinds of manual jobs. Jobs like data entry, test case design, and execution are all aspects which will be affected and will surely make such tasks obsolete sooner than later. But this will also give rise to new jobs which require testers to be aware of testing algorithms that drive these AI. It will also create managerial positions which will be managing AI bots to perform similar functions as they do now. AI-assisted software development will be a norm for quite some time until we make some technological advancements in making AI algorithms more robust.