When you talk with people, most are enthusiastic about the prospect of test automation. Imagine all the benefits that await us with it:
- Higher software quality
- Higher confidence that the software releases we make will work as intended
- Less of the monotonous tedium of laborious manual testing
All very good and desirable things!
In practice, though, if you spend time with different organizations with complex multi-tiered products, you will notice people talking about test automation, but you will also notice a suspicious absence of test automation in practice. Why is that?
If you just compile programs and deploy them once they pass compilation, you will likely be in for a bad experience. Software testing is completely necessary for a program to work reliably in the real world. Manual testing is too slow to achieve CD. So, we need test automation...