Paul Gerrard is a consultant, teacher, author, webmaster, programmer, tester, conference speaker, vlogger and publisher. He has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of software testing and quality assurance, specialising in test assurance. He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at testing conferences across Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and occasionally won awards for them.
Educated at the universities of Oxford and Imperial College London, he is a Principal of Gerrard Consulting Limited and the host of the Technology Leadership Forum and co-director of Technology Unleashed. He was the Programme Chair for the 2014 EuroSTAR conference in Dublin and for several other conferences in recent years.
In 2010 he won the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award and in 2013 he won the inaugural TESTA Lifetime Achievement Award. He won the ISTQB Testing Excellence Award in 2018.
He is the leader of an initiative to create the Test Engineering Society – a professional body for test engineers.
Companies are scrambling to incorporate AI into their software products. For example, Microsoft Copilot is the AI component in 365 used by 400m users. Test tool vendors are no exception. Every test tool now seems to have the AI added in some form. Clearly, vendors have found opportunities to use AI – mostly LLMs – to introduce, enhance or speed up various features in their products.
There are some speculative, lifecycle, visionary or proof-of-concept products emerging, but there’s no guarantee they will become the standard. There isn’t an overall vision of what AI could do for test engineers.
Paul argues that the users of testing products should be setting the agenda for the future of testing tools..
He uses his New Model for Testing – a model of tester thought processes – to set out functional areas that best support our thinking. If AI is to be an intelligent and productive assistant, it needs to be in tune with how we actually approach the problem of testing. This talk argues that testers will never get what they want unless they articulate their own vision. This is Paul’s.
© Testing United 2018. All Rights Reserved Krone Consulting s.r.o.