Over the last couple of days, a LinkedIn conversation has reminded me to write about the Productivity Paradox, which appears in Taking Testing Seriously: The Rapid Software Testing Approach, by James Bach and me.
(I haven’t written a blog post about the delivery and release of the book. I was on tour when it came out, and then a bunch of online classes, the holidays, some sad occasions in the family, and other work go in the way. Maybe some day.)
The Productivity Paradox is a phenomenon that affects developers to a significant degree, and testers profoundly. Here’s a quote from the book:
For many tasks, it takes considerable time and effort to use AI responsibly. Yet, for AI to be productive, it must save time and effort. Therefore, to maximize perceived AI productivity, we will be rewarded for using AI irresponsibly.
In other words, the more desperately management wants the magic box to work, the less they will tolerate people like you looking “behind the curtain” of the magic! This paradox is the heart of our concern about AI.
As bad a problem as that is for developers, it’s even worse for testers because of another long-term misconception that testing and development work are symmetrical. But they’re not.
Something that has taken a long time to develop might take a long time to test (because it’s really complex and risky). Or may take next to no time to test (because it’s been carefully developed, checked and tested all the way along, and built for testability). On the other hand, something developed very quickly might require very little testing if it’s simple, well understood, easily controlled, low risk… Or something developed quickly may take enormous amounts of testing when risk is significant.
AI takes that problem to an extreme. “The developers created this thing overnight, so why can’t it be tested by the end of the day today?”
Not only will we have to perform testing as efficiently as possible, but we will also have to become very good at highlighting the risks that warrant deeper testing and that require the time and the effort to do it.
2026-02-09: My colleague James Bach weighs in on “increasing productivity”, asking: has anyone considered the side effects?