AI has been a controversial hot topic in recent years. It has not only permeated every aspect of our lives but also had a profound impact on the way we work and what we do at work. Many people are experiencing anxiety about being replaced, and female software developer Jessica is no exception. However, running away from it is futile; instead, embrace it and use it to improve your efficiency and methods. Over the years, she has continuously embraced new things, constantly changing and being changed. After her transformation, she has become more confident and stronger.
Jessica, a female software developer from Dalian in the northeast of China. After graduating from university, she joined a software company and have been working there for eleven years now.
The Shift in Work Approaches and Adaptation
The year 2019 was truly special for me. Before 2019, I was engaged in JAVA software development. It was in that year, after returning from maternity leave, that my company implemented a remote working mechanism. I remember that at that time, there were few opportunities for JAVA projects, but fortunately, I got a chance to work on an automation testing project. This not only marked the beginning of my testing career but also initiated my mode of juggling childcare with work.
When I first joined the new project, I was responsible for manual testing tasks. The work intensity was not very high, but the workload was quite saturated. One of the clients I interacted with was named Brain, and our main communication channels were email and Slack. Later, as the QA system continued to grow and expand, I was assigned to another project team (located in the UK). My work began to involve the field of automation testing, using Cypress to write test cases and being responsible for maintaining daily testing reports.
At that time, due to my poor English listening skills, I felt quite nervous when communicating with clients and even bought a translation device to ensure smooth communication. However, one is always trained through practice. Gradually, I became capable of conducting business discussions in English with clients, and my work ability greatly improved.
Transitioning from a developer to a tester was actually easier than I thought, but there are significant differences in work approaches. Writing code from a developer’s perspective focuses on logic and code refactoring; whereas from a tester’s perspective, it is crucial to ensure that the code is simple, clear, efficient, and concise. I remember once writing an automation test script that a client reviewed and loved for its structure, which significantly improved execution time by several times. However, he was concerned that colleagues might need more time to understand my code during future maintenance. This minor episode at work made me realize how important adaptability is in the workplace. Opportunities always favor those who can adapt quickly to new environments, which also helped me recognize the importance of AI in the future.
Self-Learning: Enhancing Your Own Value
During the period of working on automation testing, I felt that technical knowledge was not the most critical factor; more important was communication with clients. For example, at the beginning, I only used Java to write scripts (UI scripts), but the client used Cypress, a relatively lightweight language. I had never learned Cypress before and basically wrote code while looking up information. After writing a few cases, I could master the key syntax quite proficiently. After mastering UI automation, I started learning API automation, mainly using Postman to send requests, write execution scripts, and return data formats. In this part, I needed to communicate a lot with developers because I had to understand the types of returned formats and the parameters being transmitted.
Regarding business aspects, I needed to understand the entire system’s business processes, which required a lot of time for summarizing and recording in the early stages. Any uncertainties had to be communicated with developers or other staff promptly. Initially, I recorded every module I worked on in a notebook, accumulating information bit by bit before summarizing it. Gradually, my understanding of the system’s processes became clearer. This allowed me to quickly pinpoint issues during script execution and provide accurate solutions.
Another crucial aspect is regular summarization. Every month, I review all the tasks I’ve completed and list them out. For familiar areas, I can quickly go through them, but if there are new module areas, I conduct exploratory testing in those modules. This is also a method of understanding business.
With the accumulation of technical knowledge and deeper business insights, I can easily complete each task. My abilities have improved, and I have also gained recognition from clients.
Embracing AI to Enhance Work Efficiency
Since 2023, with the evolution of AI technology, during the process of working with clients, they have proposed using AI technologies, among which chatGPT is quite commonly used. In everyday tasks, issues such as code formatting, syntax problems, and element positioning can be resolved very swiftly by chatGPT, greatly enhancing my work efficiency. There’s also Rakuten AI, which was still in the testing phase at that time and mainly used for writing and executing test cases using AI. It hasn’t been widely adopted in our projects yet. However, from the demonstrations shown by clients, Rakuten AI’s execution efficiency is truly impressive. Over ten years, we’ve evolved from manually writing test cases to now being able to generate many test cases at once with the help of AI, which has increased our efficiency several times over.
Throughout my career, there have been moments when I considered changing industries and times when I felt disappointed with my job. However, more often than not, I’ve maintained optimism, confidence, and focused on self-improvement every day. Many people have asked me if the emergence of AI makes me feel insecure about my career. I believe that as we work in the software industry, we shouldn’t fear being replaced by AI. Instead, we should actively embrace AI, make good use of AI tools to enhance our work efficiency and abilities, and ensure that we remain irreplaceable.