May 2024 Influences

Hello! It’s time for another edition of monthly influences and media. I hope you are well and excited about what 2024 has brought you.

The state of AI Products

I am excited about AI and how to test AI Products. The Art of AI Product Development by Dr. Janna Lipenkova is a great introduction to AI products. Unfortunately, it’s still too early for most enterprises.

Large companies have a massive moat and can find a way to add new features with AI. For everyone else, AI is not going to be an easy win. You still need design, user experience, information architecture, and more.

Degrees of Automation

I imagined that the opportunity was so great that it would be evident what we needed to do next. What we are learning is that it is expensive, and time coming to create a proof of concept and launching a feature into production is hard. We are not going to give up. Technology will keep changing, and we need to do our best to mitigate the risks as much as possible.

As a product manager or a quality assurance engineer your job is to continue to learn more about artifical intelligence, your business and testing. In the past, I would use the analogy of the power glove to explain how a platform and team can add more value for software engineers. With AI the search for business cases could be anywhere and this will still require better prioritization.

I’m a big fan of Reforge, and they have two great presentations on the usage of Generative AI, and they share their experiences building AI products.

Check them out if you have found a great use case for your business.

Buddha in Testing

I love testing software and I enjoy books that can tell me something different. Buddha in Testing by Pradeep Soundararajan piqued my interest. I’ve been practicing Zen for about two years and I could not wait to find out how testing and the Buddha could be connected.

This is a mini book on testing. I’ve read a lot of books about testing, and everyone has their own ideas about how to do it.

If someone were to ask me, where should I start with software testing? I would recommend this book because it is simple, yet it covers a lot of ground on what testing is. However, sometimes it is easy to miss a profound statement, for example, “Speak through your work. Speak about your work.” A core idea I took away from my Rapid Software Testing training is about telling the testing story. Testing provides value and part of our work is to explain how we did it and whether more testing could be helpful.

I wish that this book was around when I started in 2012. After I finish this book I’ll write about my own experiences and add more detail.

Buddha in Testing

Books and Media

Big Questions for Myself

  • Are we going to see another development in AI this year or should we aim toward 2025?
  • How do you mitigate risks and what framework would you use for a specific task?
  • As you construct we should step back and subtract, how can you practice that?