Generative AI for Software Development

Chapter 4. Automated Testing and Quality Assurance

Testing and quality assurance (QA) are usually the last gates that new software code must pass through before it gets deployed in production. Their ultimate goal is to find costly bugs or other standout issues that may have made it through code review (as covered in the previous chapter) to avoid putting them into production.

The QA process happens after code has been developed, reviewed, and accepted to merge into the codebase. There is occasional confusion between testing and QA as concepts, perhaps because the stakeholders traditionally involved are called either testing engineers or QA engineers at different companies. Whatever the title, though, they are usually in charge of the process covered in this chapter.

Typically, the QA process consists of conducting manual and/or automated tests in an environment that closely matches production and mimics user behavior, to catch any bugs that escaped the code-review process.

When such bugs are found during testing/QA, the feature is regressed back to development status. The original software engineer in charge of implementation must fix the issues before pushing the feature to review and QA again. These regression loops aim to guarantee that the code that ultimately gets deployed to production is indeed bug-free.

These processes are critical to any software development team. We can break them into two main categories: automated and manual.

Automated tests

Automated testing employs ...