AI is well-suited to the tedious work of testing and QA.
I think writing tests is a great use of ai, but only if the tests themselves are throughly reviewed or are themselves validated by statements in a formal system.
That's more-or-less how I define QA work. The goal is not proving overall correctness, it's surfacing individual issues.
I think people higher up are warning against a naive mistake, which is asking one agent to write both the product and the test suite. Here, making things up and cheating becomes a problem of quality theater...
The QA role (regardless of whether it's performed by an AI or a human) typically involves breaking tests, not writing them. (This applies more to unit tests, integration tests blur this line.)
this doesn't sound like your model, and I'm unclear what it means to break a test. maybe test automation, in which case, sure that seems fair game for AI, but that not where the real meat is.
This pretty much. My last job didn't really have QA so I did the next best thing which is writing a bunch of integration tests for the use cases that matters for the product. They were not an indication for correctness, but more like a canary to warn me if I break something while developing. Bugs reported by consumers usually warn me of area not well covered.
QA would play the same whole. They shouldn't need to check for code correctness, their most useful task is to surface bugs that breaks the product requirements (performance, security, business logic,...). And for that, having knowledge of the implementation is unnecessary. In the above example of writing integration tests, I took care of only using the public interface of the modules.
In my mind, tests are everyone's responsibility, but the goal differs. A regular developer adds features and should be writing tests to prove their code functions as intended. QA does not add features, so their goal is finding holes in code added by others.
It's the adversarial relationship mentioned by a parent:
> Have [QA] build tests to break the code. Don't give [QA] the job of making a test suite that passes.