Pros and cons with test automation
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 Continuous Delivery. So, we need test automation to succeed with Continuous Delivery. Therefore, let's further investigate the problem areas surrounding...