GenAI Is Useless If You Don’t Have a Test Strategy First

I’ve seen this mistake play out time and time again.

A team is underwater—drowning in flaky tests, patchy coverage, or endless test cycles. The pressure’s on to modernize, automate, and move faster. So they reach for the latest shiny object:

💡 “Let’s use GenAI to write our test cases!”
💡 “Let’s plug ChatGPT into our pipelines!”
💡 “Let’s build an AI assistant for QA!”

But here’s the hard truth:

AI accelerates what already works—not what’s broken.

If your testing foundation is weak, GenAI won’t save you. It will just scale the mess.

What’s Missing?

Before you bring GenAI into your testing strategy, ask yourself:

• Do you have a clear test strategy?
  Or are you just checking boxes for “coverage”?
• Are your pipelines and environments stable?
  Or are your tests constantly failing due to flaky infra?
• Do you have traceability between tests and requirements?
  Or is it unclear what’s being tested and why?
• Are your test patterns reusable and modular?
  Or are you duplicating logic and writing brittle tests?
• Is your test data high-quality and reliable?
  Or is it ad-hoc, inconsistent, or hard to manage?

Without these, GenAI will generate tests that:

• Miss the point
• Reinforce bad patterns
• Amplify tech debt

In other words—it will just write more bad tests, faster.

What To Do First

If you're serious about leveraging GenAI in QA, don’t start with the AI.

Start with your foundations:

1️⃣ Define your coverage goals
What risks are you trying to mitigate? What do you want confidence in?

2️⃣ Build reusable infrastructure
Page Objects, fixtures, helpers—invest in clean abstractions.

3️⃣ Stabilize data and environments
Flaky environments = flaky tests. Clean this up first.

4️⃣ Align with product and engineering
Make quality a shared responsibility, not a silo.

Once your testing maturity is solid, then bring in GenAI as a force multiplier:

• Auto-generate tests based on requirements or user journeys
• Use LLMs to triage failures or suggest fixes
• Leverage agentic testing for exploratory paths or edge cases
• Automate test documentation and traceability

The Future of QA Isn’t Just Automated—It’s Smart

But smart starts with strategy.

GenAI is one of the most powerful tools we’ve ever had in software quality. But without intentional design, you’ll just end up accelerating dysfunction.

So don’t chase the trend. Build the foundation first.

Then let AI amplify what’s already working.