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Repackaging Old Ideas in New Bottles: Is This Innovation?

The software testing industry seems to have a recurring habit of rediscovering established practices, giving them fashionable new names, and presenting them as the next big innovation. I find myself wondering: are we actually advancing the discipline, or just reinventing its vocabulary?

1. Shift-left Testing – Discovering What We Already Knew?

Reviewing requirements before development, identifying ambiguities in acceptance criteria, involving testers early, preparing test cases before implementation, and identifying defects as early as possible have been established software engineering and testing practices for decades. There is nothing particularly revolutionary about these activities. Yet, suddenly, we have a fashionable new term for them: Shift-left Testing. Are we really discovering something new, or simply giving established practices a new name and presenting them as the next big thing? Good testing has always been about preventing defects rather than waiting for them to appear in a finished product. Changing the terminology doesn't make the underlying principle an innovation.

2. Low-code/No-code Automation – Déjà Vu?

Remember keyword-driven automation? The promise was that testers without programming skills could create automated tests using predefined keywords, while someone else maintained the underlying implementation. Fast-forward to today, and we have low-code and no-code automation platforms promising essentially the same thing, now with visual interfaces and AI thrown into the mix. Of course, the technology has evolved, but the fundamental principle hasn't changed: somebody still has to implement and maintain the underlying automation, whether through conventional programming, AI generated code or an abstraction layer. Hiding the code doesn't eliminate the need for engineering. It simply moves the complexity elsewhere.

Repackaging old ideas in new bottles and calling them innovation – is that really progress?

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