The podcast that I listened to this week was very enjoyable by the one and only Joe Colantonio from Test Talks. He talks to Angie Jones about Artificial Intelligence and Testing. Angie is a senior software engineer test at twitter who has developed automation strategies and frameworks for countless software products. What Angie and Joe talk about is the reality of testing in the artificial world. Angie has noticed that she has seen a lot of tools helping with artificial intelligence and how artificial intelligence will save the day. What is missing from the conversation, Angie highlights, is how to test these forms of Artificial intelligence that is present today, like machine learning which many applications are using it. You do not realize how many things use machine learning like Netflix, and Twitter. Both of these has features that use machine learning. Many see it has something that is in the future but that is wrong. They are present and will be even more prevalent in the future. There needs to be more focus on testing this stuff. People also do not see this as a testable feature, and do not worry about testing it. The thing though is that you think that it my be learning one thing, while it may be tricking you and learning something completely different. Some of the lessons she learned from testing AI is that it challenges a lot of guidelines, especially around automation. There is not exactness or preciseness. There are a range of values that could be valid and Angie did have to get creative and dig deeper down to figure out what was correct. She also learned that if the tester was not a programmer, which is a huge debate whether a tester should be a programmer, she had to test a lot of algorithms and know how to code to test them. Lastly the one piece of advice that Angie would give to the audience is that dont let anyone make you believe that AI and machine learning is this all-knowing black box, and a testers we should know this. Read more into what machine learning is, the different applications used in machine learning, and to take the time to think about how you would test something. The podcast for this week was very interesting. Again, this was a podcast that talked about issues that are going on now. AI and machine learning is something that is becoming very popular and will not do anything but get even more popular. With it growing and growing, it is as Angie said, very important now, and even more vital in the future to figure out how to test it and the correct way.
