Mel's Prediction Corner: Down the Road

"I reject your reality and substitute my own" - Adam Savage


One of the reasons I wanted to change the format of my blog was to open it up for more ideas than just discussing in fun and clever ways how movies can influence my work or how I look at my job as a tester in the field of software development.

I generate ideas. I love giving people ideas! It could be anything from a product modification to just suggesting what things might look like in 20 years. Some of them are like the flying car, they will probably never happen. Others though, might be reality later on. That's half the fun. I think it's one of the reasons I like usability testing and design. I have a chance to work with something and make it even better. Testing lets me do that in all kinds of ways and I think that's what appeals to me the most, the possibility to make something better than it was before.

Prediction corner are a few thoughts I have about what might happen in the near future. These are mostly just thoughts I put together based on things I've read. For me, it's kinda fun thinking about where things will be and how much will change.

In 20 years or less, GUIs and UIs in general won't exist as we know them today.

So, this is probably not as mind blowing as you think reading it.  We won't have them. Companies will either specialize in content or the interface, they won't be doing both. I predict that we will eventually buy devices that will present us with widgets that can run content from different sources. It won't have a UI of it's own because whatever device we have will be the UI. We are already trending towards this. Consoles do this to an extent. Chromebooks and mobile devices are almost there with their own OS with some or all content and services partially or entirely based in the cloud.

In the next 50 years, humans won't write code, we'll all be testers instead.

I've seen articles pop up in my email and twitter feed taking about the end of testing or the end of QA. I predict, that eventually, when AIs become a very stable and very affordable thing, people won't be writing software code. Design will be dictated to an AI, specified out according to business rules fed into the AI and then, tested, tweaked and tested again. I think testing and testers will be come even more important than developers and everybody in the software and hardware industry will move more towards testing methodologies and systems that support people testing computer/AI made products.

Knowing and understanding how functions and classes work won't be important. Making sure the "thing" works as needed and/or interacting with the AI writing the code will be paramount. What we are doing now as testers in this growing business could end up defining how we test things in the future. How people approach software development has already changed rapidly in the last 20 years. There might come a time when the difference between developers and testers will be moot point. When, not if, the AIs take over writing code, someone is still going to have to test it out. (3)



Reference Articles:
1)Microsoft opens Windows 10 to iPhone, Android apps
2)The npm Blog - kik, left-pad and npm
3)How Should We Talk to AIs? 

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