The field of AI has experienced rapid growth in recent years, with AI-driven startups increasing their funding from $30 billion in 2020 to approximately $65 billion in 2021. This momentum continued into 2023, marked by significant funding for OpenAI and other companies specializing in General AI. Amid this expansive growth, this article emphasizes the crucial quality aspects of developing AI products and services.
AI possesses the capability to rapidly learn and apply business rules and implicit biases to decision-making processes at scale. Identifying and eliminating flaws or biases from AI models is imperative before they impact customers. Traditional testing approaches, especially those relying on manual testing, may prove inadequate in this dynamic and fast-paced AI environment.
Quality considerations for AI products and services include:
- Accuracy testing (aka model validation)
- Unit testing
- Integration testing
- Regression testing
- User Acceptance testing
- Performance testing
- Ethics/Bias testing
While many of these considerations align with traditional software quality practices, certain aspects are unique to AI. Let’s delve into each aspect more comprehensively.
Accuracy Testing (aka Model Validation)
Building an AI/ML product involves creating a decision-making model. Ensuring the model’s accuracy is crucial, involving testing with a dataset divided into training and testing sets. The accuracy of decisions on unseen data is measured to validate the model’s performance.
Unit Testing
After developing a working model, the product is built around it. Unit tests serve as a safety net, quickly identifying failures and providing a narrow signal on the source of issues. Aim for 70-80% coverage through unit tests for effective code validation.
Integration Testing
Once individual components are validated, integration testing assesses how they function together within the broader system. These tests provide insights into interactions with other systems, covering about 10% of test coverage.
Regression Testing
Verifying that changes do not break existing functionality is the goal of regression testing. Automated testing tools, such as AquilaTest, can prioritize high-risk cases, enabling faster test cycles and focused attention on critical areas.
User Acceptance Testing
Features or stories are tested against well-defined acceptance criteria to ensure they meet user expectations. AquilaTest’s codeless automation platform simplifies scenario creation across multiple systems, expediting the testing process.
Performance Testing
Anticipating success and preparing for scalability is vital. Performance testing helps identify product limits, resource usage patterns, and potential regressions. AquilaTest offers a single platform for API testing, load, and performance tests, streamlining testing efforts.
Ethics/Bias Testing
Testing models for ethical considerations and biases, especially regarding gender and race, is crucial. This is important to prevent unnecessary negative PR. Automated tests facilitate regular checks to prevent morally indefensible decisions and negative publicity.
Conclusion
The rapid evolution of AI demands a proactive approach to quality assurance. Test teams and SMEs together play a pivotal role in ensuring both functional and ethical considerations are addressed in AI development. When test teams are armed with the right tools, AI-powered test automation enables efficient testing, allowing testing teams to focus on strategic tasks and contribute to the overall quality strategy of the organization. This is where AquilaTest shines – by bringing sanity throughout the onboarding, executing, and maintaining phases of test automation. This enables testing teams to free up valuable resources from mundane tasks to focus on higher leverage activities like quality advisory and developer productivity enhancements.
