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copied!<p>All of the advantages given for automated testing in your link are accurate enough, though I would add "...if done properly" to each one. Poorly designed or implemented automated testing can lead to the exact opposite (I've seen all of the following!):</p> <ul> <li><strong>cost time and money to troubleshoot or maintain, due to poor accuracy</strong> - for example, if the test fails frequently due to timing variations or variations in the testing environment that are not properly accounted for, or if the test depends on some undocumented behavior that later gets changed</li> <li><strong>reduce test coverage</strong> - if developers rely on the automated tests too heavily and do not take the time to think about how best to exercise the specific code they're working on ("I'm fixing a bug that involves interaction between X and Y, so if I run the unit test for X and the unit test for Y, that covers everything!")</li> <li><strong>miss what manual testing can do</strong> - for example, the benefit and curse of automated testing is that it does the same exact thing every time. The human factor in manual testing (variation in timing, accidental mouse-clicks or typos, changing the order in which you do things, paying attention to usability) can uncover issues that would otherwise have been missed by an automated test.</li> <li><strong>harm team morale</strong> - if getting fragile automated tests to pass at all costs takes focus away from actually ensuring that the system is working as intended.</li> </ul> <p>That said, sensibly designed and implemented automated tests are absolutely a benefit. I would argue though that a sane mixture of automated and manual testing is generally better than "all automation, all the time". Some particularly complex one-off tests may not justify the additional time and cost involved in automating them to re-run later. And unless your automation is ludicrously comprehensive, the variation inherent in manual testing always provides some additional confidence and the possibility of uncovering things that the automated test procedure may not have encountered.</p>

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