Exploring and automating

It is easy to think of test automation as a way to quickly do the things that we could do in a manual way. There can be times where this is true. If you are doing some tedious, repetitive work that requires doing the same thing over and over again, by all means automate it if you can! However, there is danger that comes with this kind of thinking as well. If you start to think of automation as replacing what humans do, you will end up making poor automation. Manual and automated testing may have the same goal of reducing the risk of shipping bugs to clients, but the way that they achieve this goal is radically different.

For example, a manual test that is meant to help you figure out if a change to the API has caused issues will be guided by what you, as the tester, know about the change you've made. It will also be influenced by the tester themselves. If you are familiar with the API, you will try and observe different things than someone who is not...