Page - viii - in The Future of Software Quality Assurance

viii Preface does this work when teams are working all over the globe, in different time zones? How can tests be scheduled, if results have to be deliveredwithin an agile working regimeorduring the developmentphase? The testing profession has changed considerably in the last 15 years, and today it facesenormousnewchallenges. Automationandtheuseofartificialintelligencehavebroughtchangestomethods and to core areas. Here further improvements must be made in training and continuingprofessionaldevelopment todevelopgeneralandspecialist testingskills andcompetence. TheFutureIs Before Us Fundamentalchangesare emerging that will have significant impact on our society in the coming years, and in some cases have already changed it. The response capacity of machines will continue to increase sharply. They will exceed human possibilitiesmanytimesover.Machineswillprocessdatafaster,bemoremobileand more flexible. Robot axes are already moving autonomously in Phoenix, USA; in Heidelberg,Germany,a trainedartificial intelligencesystemrecognizesskincancer onphotographsbetter thanmost doctorswithaverage levelsofexperience. Information is being processed by ever more powerful devices. The results are becomingevermorecomplex.Howcantoday’smassivedatavolumesbemonitored and controlledby humans?Or, to put it anotherway, how can a human test a robot that ismore ‘intelligent’ than the tester him/herself? The need forcontinuingprofessionaldevelopmentwill continue to increase. Every day we receive new information on our smartphones about our changing world.Aboutthejobsthataredisappearingandaboutothersthatarereplacingthem. About transparentdata thatofferspracticaladvantages tous ina thousandeveryday things.Atthesametimewehear(andsee)policy-makersdebatingtheseverythings. New Ethics Artificial intelligence will not take away the necessity for us to think. On the contrary, certainly we will make use of artificial intelligence to control the ever- more complex functions of machines. We must nevertheless concentrate on what we can do as humans—and on what we can pick up and learn to do. For all the questionsaboutartificial intelligence,aboutdigitizationandautomation, thehuman will remain thedecisive factor. After 15 years of working intensively in the IT training sector, iSQI has shown with complete clarity that without specialists, automation is nothing. And artificial intelligence is nothing without people who specify to it what is ‘intelligent’. The more complex the systems become, the more important will be training and also