Top Reasons for Not Automating Tests

Despite the existence for quite some time already test automation is practiced not consistently enough. You can hear a lot of tester’s arguments about not automating their tests and the most popular ones are featured below. However these reasons often do not reflect the reality.

1. I have no Time for Automation.

Sure, when starting with automation it costs additional time to setup test automation. Instead of always complaining it takes too much time, just think about how much time it costs doing the same manual test a few hundred times. Just take this time and automate the test and it will pay off rather sooner than later. Just do it, one by one!

2. Test Automation takes my Job away.

Testing is an intellectual activity which requires someone to decide what to automate before the automation itself. Just remember that automation doesn’t think for itself and only checks situations you defined. Hence additional manual testing always matters so don’t be afraid of losing your job being replaced by automated tests.

3. I’m not a Coder.

This isn’t a reason to ignore automation completely. As a tester you don’t need to do it all yourself and should mainly help to decide on the test scripts to be automated. Surely, when you really want to do test automation yourself some investment is required from you. As most frameworks helping with automation require no in-depth programming skills basics will be enough for carrying out some valuable automation.

As we can see these excuses are often strained and don’t make much sense. Test automation is practically saving resources but it needs manual maintenance nevertheless.