Andy & Kevin 16 How current Appvance users can use GENI

Let's imagine for a second, I, I'm an appfance customer. I'm already an advanced customer. I'm already part of, part of the tribe. What do I do next now that Jenny's here?

Yeah.

Phone urgently. Get onto aiq, get ready for this.

Phone urgently. What we're doing is we're, you know, we're going to work with you on a handful of applications at first and, and we have a pricing model for that and, and, and, and you know, we're going to roll that out across those applications and there'll be some probably learning both ways is what we're finding, right? And then very quickly they see the roi. It's, you know, it's weeks, not months and then it just starts piling up as you add more applications and more applications more. And what people are doing is they're going, I had these thousand manual tests and you know, it took a few weeks and there were a few fits and bushes and this and that, but I now have a thousand scripts and they run. I've automated something that I wasn't able to automate for seven years and it's automated. And they're a hero, right? I mean that manager is a hero. Now they may not manage that 50 person team anymore that was doing the manual testing because maybe they're not there any longer, but they just did something that looks to the CIO as not only a miracle, but fabulous. Cost reduction, time reduction, improvement in results, improvement of visibility. Who's going to argue that, right? Everybody's a hero who uses this. But be ready for some, like I said, fits and starts because it's AI and it's, we have to, it's not learning from, but we have to learn again to grow that aperture of unique applications. And every application is a unique application.

I think the superficial answer that people talk about when it comes to QA testing is there's going to be no more testers, it's all going to be done by AI and developers are actually going to trigger the testing. That probably isn't going to happen, I don't think given the function itself. And what I think you used a great example at the start of the session of the podcast today, just around the notion that we started out to become software QA professionals and ended up scripters. So the scripting bit goes away. Look out five years then, and how does software QA operate in a large enterprise? And then what are those people doing?

Well, that's a great question. So look, it is easy to say AI is going to take over all these jobs. But that's not what we're finding. What we're finding is AI is certainly replacing certain tasks. Okay? The function of software QA doesn't go away. In fact, it's even more important. It's getting more important because the developers are getting more productive to generate more code faster, which really means that software QA gets even more important. Right. If they're generating 50% more code faster than you know, and doing fixes faster, then you have to be even faster. So as QA doesn't go away, it becomes more important, but certain tasks will go away. We have been hoping to get rid of manual regression testing for 30 years. This is not a new ideal. And we thought Selenium would do it. We thought recorders would do it. And here we are. 70% is still manual. Right. So we continue to march towards a time when I think, finally we can say that manual testing, for the most part, will be gone. We certainly have a technology that has the promise to replace most manual testing. I think that's good news. It's not good news for the manual testers, I understand that. But it's fundamentally good news for enterprises. I think that we have a technology now that fundamentally will write all of the code that we need in scripting. Right. And so the test automation code, whether it be Selenium or Firmware, if this is 10 to 100 times faster, and I don't have a human involved or many humans involved, probably that code is. We're still going to have scripts because we want to repeat those scripts for regression testing. But AI can write those scripts. And so that. Where does that leave our QA teams? Where QA teams become much more strategic. Now, let me give you a real example. From the late 80s, Excel shows up in finance departments, and everyone in the finance department used to have a pencil and a ledger book. And all they were doing is writing numbers in these ledger books. And then Excel came and wiped out that task. Wiped out that task. But what it did is make all the finance people strategic. There's no one in finance making sure that the pennies are added correctly. There's no double check on that. Why? Because Excel does that math very well. You can excel at math with Excel. So we've had, if you think about a perfect math model, financial model and math model now for, you know, 30 to 40 years. Right. A very long time. A very long time. We don't even think about that today. It's a given that people don't do that Tab. We don't do long division in our head. Why would we do it? We have a tool that does that. Right. Five years from now. I think it will be a shock to me if people are still scripting in any way sort of manually now. They may edit scripts, they may want to just create one really quickly and don't go through any other process. I get that. But generally they. This whole industry of. We're actually industry of two and a half million scripters or manual testers, right? Two and a half to three million scripters or manual testers. That doesn't make any sense. Now I'd like to see a lot of those people redeployed in a much more strategic position in qa like we did in finance. Everybody became strategic and thoughtful about how we can deploy the money, where we deploy the money, where, where our spend is analyzing that spend. That's what we're going to do in qa. And that's going to allow us very high visibility of our bugs long before, long before anyone finds them in the outside world or the inside world. So I think it's very exciting. So if I'm in qa, what do I want to do? I want to be the robot overlord. I want to run the AI, I want to learn how to make these digital twins. I want to learn how to train the system. I want to learn how to check the outcomes, that you will be employed forever. But if all you want to do is say, hey, I'm a Selenium scripter and I'm going to keep writing Selenium, that's over. Over the next handful, it's just over. There's a machine that does that, right? You know, no different than I am the person who does long division in my head. Okay? There are no jobs today for long division in the head people. It's great you have that skill. There's no jobs for them. There will be no job for Selenium scriptures. And someone's going to write to me and they're going to yell at me for saying that just what it is. But there's plenty of jobs in software QA to be the robot overlord and to really make major strategic analysis and decisions about the quality of our applications.