Track Talk

Introducing ‘Cobots’ in QA: Testing in the 4th industrial revolution

Prabhuram Govindarajan

14:15-14:45 CEST Thursday 30th September

From the Terminator era, we have transformed into an Iron man era, the robots have become the Cobots (Collaborative Robots). The line between physical, digital, and biological entities have been blurred with the advent of:

– Artificial intelligence
– Internet of Things and
– Autonomous vehicles

We are testing the products coming out of the 4th industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), but there is also an opportunity to leverage/employ them while testing. Let me give 2 examples:

Example 1: With Covid impacting our life, while shopping, self-checkout, and self-billing are the new normal. I use a mobile/scanner to checkout, engage with the POS machine and payment terminals to finish shopping. How to test this situation/ecosystem?

Example 2: We are swamped with devices, a smartwatch, mobile, voice assistants (Alexa/Google) which in turn engage with the internet. A hand movement with a smartwatch, get the priority to respond even with other devices around. How to test this situation/ecosystem?

In both the situation, there are a mix of Physical, Digital and Biological entities. My session will be about explaining with more practical examples as to how the Cobots can be the answer to test in the above situations.

This is going to be the future with almost all industries becoming partly technological companies. The QA has to improvise to be in this league and contribute like always.