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EuroSTAR Conference

Europe's Largest Software Testing Conference.

Tutorial G

How to Test Magic

Michael Bolton

09:00 - 17:00 CEST, Monday 15th June

Now that serious software and huge systems are being built from AI-based components, and using AI-based tools, what is left for humans to do? Responsibility demands at least one thing : that we ask the question “did it do a good job?” This question must be answered with testing.

It might help to think of AI, and especially generative AI, as a sort of magic box. People say it can do anything and everything. How do we test such a claim? How might we a magic box in our testing? How can we responsibly release AI products and work with AI test tools? To answer these questions, testers must raise their skills to a new level — and even developers who’ve never enjoyed it will now find testing to be a large part of their work.

Testing AI isn’t like testing normal software. Yes, all the historic problems of testing are still with us, but there are new challenges. One is that GenAI doesn’t behave deterministically. A lot of the testing we need to do is therefore probabilistic and statistical.

A single round of a test is no better than a one-off sales demo. You have to run many trials, study the results, and report on the problems you find. Another challenge is that we have to figure out what kinds of problems are worth reporting, and what problems will be marked “can’t fix.”

In this workshop, you’ll learn why AI is a new and different testing problem, how you can cope with that problem, and how using AI to perform testing is intriguing but also risky.

I will share content from my book Taking Testing Seriously, that addresses these issues.

What you will learn

  1. You'll learn eight aspects of AI that make it a special problem for testing
  2. With hands-on exercises, you'll learn strategies for dealing with those problems
  3. You'll learn how to decide when using AI in testing is intolerably risky — and when it might be okay

Session Details

  • Intermediate
  • 6hrs
  • Interactive Tutorial
  • Implementing/integrating AI tools
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Check out this video from Michael Bolton to hear more about his talk on How to Test Magic.

We look forward to welcoming you to EuroSTAR 2026.

Session Speakers

Michael Bolton

Michael Bolton

DevelopSense, Canada

Michael Bolton is a consulting software tester and testing teacher who helps people to solve testing problems that they didn’t realize they could solve.

Michael has over 35 years of experience testing, developing, managing, and writing about software. He’s co-author, with James Bach, of Taking Testing Seriously: The Rapid Software Testing Approach. He was Programme Chair for EuroSTAR in 2013 and 2024, and this will be his 20th straight year at the conference. 

Contact Michael at michael@developsense.com, or through his Web site, https://developsense.com.

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