Why you should NOT automate your tests

Why you should NOT automate your tests

I know what are you thinking, "why can anyone say that we don't need test automation?" and you're right! But, we need to also consider the context, the most of articles that I have read about "why you should automate your test" always talk about the benefits like reduce effort on repetitive tests, greater consistency to our testing approaches or easier access to info (results) about testing. The thing is, we are not always working on a well defined processes, for example we are a typical company that have our testers and had heard about the Automated Testing process and benefits so, the company, want to apply this to their daily activities. Here is when we should review if we should or not add the automated test activity to our business.

A common error that we get when we want to add the automated testing approach to our system is thinking that this will be the key solution to improve the Quality of our product, and that is not the case, the automated test are expensive to maintain, and will not cover the whole testing process for the products, usually, the automated tests cover only the happy path on a system, let's say that we have a product that sell clothes online, you will create an automated test that start from login, to adding clothes to your cart and will end with placing an order (in a lower environment of course, we don't want to add fake order in production and mess up our analytics). Now, what happen if, in the login page, the user type the wrong credentials, what if the clothe size is out of stock, what if the user set a wrong address for the delivery, all of this scenarios should not being automated, I mean you can do it, but if we decide to change the flow or, even, we make a small change on the login button selector, we must update all of our test so they can start working properly again.

Another thing to consider when you want to add automated test in a product, is that we usually tend to underestimate the time, cost and effort on the tool that we want to use for automating (Selenium, Cypress, TestCafe, etc.), this means that it cost a lot to add the tool and we will start seeing the benefits of it in several months, it will not give us value since the beginning of the implementation.

To finish this, we should keep in mind that Automating doesn't mean that we will replace other testing processes like Unit Testing, Integration Testing or Manual Testing. This will help us to improve some of the testing activities, more oriented (in my personal opinion) on the pipeline flow to confirm that the happy path works and we are good to deploy on prod without any breaking change. What do you think about it? You can leave your opinion in the comment section :D