Software teams should take a leaf out of manufacturers books when it comes to testing code

As AI continues accelerating code production, developers should take a leaf out of the manufacturing industry’s book to automate testing processes safely.

That’s according to Ingo Philipp, VP of product engineering at UiPath. Speaking to ITPro, Philipp suggested that “lights-out” manufacturing-style processes could alleviate strain placed on teams facing a torrent of code.

Also known as ‘dark factories’, lights-out manufacturing techniques involve fully automated production lines, and are a tried and tested method in the manufacturing industry.

Japanese engineering firm FANUC has been running these autonomous factories for more than two decades, requiring minimal human input except for quality control and overseeing production.

For developer teams, Philipp noted the same techniques could be applied to software development. UiPath coined the term ‘dark testing factories’ in a recent whitepaper, noting that this could both speed up and secure software testing.

“We see that the demand for software testing is just exploding these days. That’s what we see day in, day out from our customers,” he told ITPro.

“At the same time, we also see that they are struggling with the demand. That means they can’t really keep up with this increased volume, increased velocity of software development,” Philipp added.

“That means there is a gap essentially between the demand and the supply. So that's the challenge. I think it has always been a challenge.”

Matching velocity

As Philipp noted, the concept comes amid the growing use of AI in software development. Figures from Stack Overflow’s most recent Developer Survey found 84% of devs have adopted AI, with more than half (51%) using these tools everyday.

With increased production velocity comes added risks, however. In its 2026 AI Engineering report, engineering analytics platform Faros, showed teams now report 54% more bugs per developer compared to pre-AI processes.

Similar research from GitLab found that the volume of code written using AI is surging, yet 92% of developers reported significant governance challenges.

With these issues expected to continue, creating an isolated, automated production pipeline in which code can be tested safely is critical, according to Philipp.

“Think of Codex, think of Claude, think of all the Copilots and Coworks out there,” he said. “They’re enabling our friends in software development to crank out more code faster than ever these days.

“We see our customers, our partners really struggling to keep up with this increased volume and velocity in software development with the traditional approaches they are using in their software testing.”

Automating the pipeline

UiPath’s contention is that with ‘dark testing factories’, AI agents can automate aspects of software testing before it has the potential to cause downstream issues.

In these settings, AI agents would weed out potential bugs while human developers focus more on quality control, security, and governance. Philipp added that testers will eventually “teach the factory to do the work”.

Automation in software testing is by no means a new trend, he noted. In this instance though, it’s a case of speeding things up in line with acceleration across the broader development lifecycle.

“It’s autonomous testing on steroids,” he told ITPro. “The goal here is to … do away with all the operational, repetitive, mundane testing work from the humans and elevate them into more ‘quality leaders’.”

This does raise the question of whether enterprises are simply adding more automation – and complexity – to an already complicated and highly-automated process.

Philip said, however, that automation in this context will still require robust human oversight. Customers adopting this approach are able to create strict guardrails on what tasks agents can perform, much like other areas in which agents are deployed and a human-in-the-loop approach is still vital.

One customer, he said, set boundaries around what actions agents can take without human intervention, reverting to testers in certain circumstances.

“Who is actually the quality owner? Who is the person that needs to provide clarity on that? This is not something new, because they already have it as part of their existing testing process. We just factored it in.”

Philip told ITPro that while customers are shifting toward this approach, it’s at a moderate pace. Long-term, he envisages a far more AI-fuelled testing setup but only a handful of companies have the capabilities right now to achieve this.

“I want to be brutally honest here, almost none of our customers are there at the moment,” he said. “None of our customers [have] achieved the holy grail of making testing fully autonomous. I don’t think it is achievable in the short-term and mid-term.”

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