Critical Thinking in AI-Assisted Testing: Check the Source - Steve Watson

Use AI in testing without losing judgment or ownership

In this episode, I talk with Steve Watson about critical thinking in the age of AI in testing. Steve says treat AI like a smart teammate. Useful, but you still check its work. We talk bias, missing context, and why lazy shortcuts tempt us. He shares where AI helped, like clustering survey responses, and where it missed ambiguities in requirements. We look at our craft: Ask better questions. Focus on the user. Let tools draft, but you decide. Train the next generation in skepticism and analysis. Same mission. New habits.

"We're moving away from telling a computer what to do to actually collaborating with it." - Steve Watson

Steve Watson is an experienced Quality Engineering Manager who leads and coaches testing teams to help them to be the best testers they can be.

As a Senior Quality Engineering Manager at easyJet, he is responsible for the overall testing strategy and standards within the Airline Operations area, managing an offshore testing function and the testing budget. His mission is to ensure that Quality Engineering is embedded as early as possible to add value, working with key business and IT stakeholders to identify improvement areas and gain buy-in and support to implement change.

Steve has vast experience in a variety of domains - banking & finance, vehicle leasing, chemical pricing and aerospace, and other than a brief stint as a Product Manager and then Project Manager in 2018, he has spent most of his professional career in the testing & quality engineering space.

As a member of the British Computer Society, Steve cares about improving how we test as an industry, and he writes a blog to share his personal thoughts and ideas.

Steve has spoken at a number of conferences over the past 12 years, including the National Software Testing Conference, Test Expo, UKStar and HUSTEF, facilitated a Zoom roundtable event, ran a BDD interactive workshop at a UK Meetup, and has been a guest on the Testing Peers podcast.

When Steve is not testing, you’ll find him broadcasting a Saturday morning radio show on a local community station in East Sussex, UK, where he has volunteered for the past 12 years.

Highlights:

• AI is a tool for collaboration, not delegation: accepting its output without verifying the source data means the tester has not done the job.
• Testers who offload analytical work to AI risk losing the ability to judge whether an output is correct, and that loss is hard to recover once it compounds over years.
• AI tools carry biases that are not always visible, and without independent verification those biases can produce outputs that systematically disadvantage users outside a narrow demographic bracket.
• The core tester responsibility stays constant regardless of who or what wrote the code: determine whether the software delivers what was expected for the end user.

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