coTestPilot: AI for Human Testers

Richard Bradshaw pointed out that most of the talk about AI for developers is to assist their work and give them superpowers. Most of the chatter regarding AI for testers is to replace most of their work and focus on automation instead of helping humans. I am guilty as charged, Richard!

“I really feel like the testing tool space is getting AI all wrong.” — Richard Bradshaw

Richard’s comment reminded me of building tools to assist with manual and exploratory bug filing when I worked at Google. My team built a Chrome extension for Google Maps. But, it was a lot of work, and I left soon after. Along with me, any momentum and resources to complete and deploy it left the company. Frustratingly, many of the early ‘testers’ were just being ‘testers’ and only tried to find the flaws instead of focusing on building value. This might be part of the reason testers don’t get many great tools. Hmmm…

Thanks to Richard’s nudge, I’ve built an AI-first version of the Chrome extension to help testers. It is super simple, whenever a tester is, well, testing, they can click a button and get some AI suggestions for things like possible bugs, things to explore, test cases, and flows that users would expect to complete. It also delivers a summary of the page and even includes some thoughts on what is *Good* about the page so testers can start winning friends and influencing people :-)

This is just the beginning. If you want to try it out or deploy it at your work, or just have suggestions, let me know.

I’m super interested in testers’ thoughts, dreams, and suggestions. If there is enough interest, maybe we can keep building this out and deliver superpowers for actual human testers with AI.

Thanks for the nudge, Richard!

— Jason Arbon