TWiQ Episode 132 - AI debate extended version

This episode fired me up with the AI debate. I still believe that today, that our systems thinking has never been more important. I was thinking about this over the weekend.

From early on in my Testing/Quality career I learned that the reason our role was difficult was that we had to balance cost, quality and timescale. Sacrifice one and you impact the other two, spend too much on one and you impact the other two. Thats why its difficult because you have to balance all 3. Getting better at what we do requires balancing all 3.

How many vendors are marketing AI solutions to balance all 3? All I'm seeing is fixation on timescale. Which is rubbing off on organisations expectations and then the pressure is being pushed down to engineering teams. From engineering teams, rather than question those motives from above it seems to be an acceptance that "well, we have to get used to it so we might as well get stuck in". Then engineering teams are then using AI to focus on timescale, looking at Quality Engineers and saying "you need to adapt". In my opinion, AI isn't breaking up teams, its the motivation behind its use.

To me the motives are everything, and if those motives are without direction or a balanced goal to be better, I will question them and I won't stop until there is a balanced goal. As Shawn Vernier and myself said, in our organisations we can be seen as anti AI. Far from it, I use it every day, but to bring people together. I'm looking for a day where its use is marketed and championed to bring teams and people together. Where we share the benefits of its use, achieving a balanced progressive improvement in creating better software.