Several programming tools are emerging which help to automate software testing, one of which we have been developing ourselves. The prospects look exciting; but it raises questions about how far this will encroach on the profession. Could we be looking at a world of Terminator-like software writers who consign their human counterparts to the dole queue?

We computer programmers devote an unholy amount of time to testing software and fixing bugs. It's costly, time consuming and fiddly - yet it's vital if you want to bring high quality software to market.

A common method of testing software involves running a program, asking it to do certain things and seeing how it copes. Known as dynamic analysis, many tools exist to help with this process, usually throwing thousands of random choices at a program and checking all the responses.

Facebook recently unveiled a tool called Sapienz that is a big leap forward in this area. Originally developed by University College London, Sapienz is able to identify bugs in Android software via automated tests that are far more efficient than the competition - requiring between 100 and 150 choices by the user compared to a norm of nearer 15,000.

The difference is that Sapienz contains an evolutionary algorithm that learns from the software's responses to previous choices. It then makes new choices that aim to find the maximum number of glitches and test the maximum number of kinds of choices, doing everything as efficiently as possible.