| | JUNE 20218CIOReviewIN MY OPINIONTHE AUTOMATION TRAPBy Gerold Rajesh, Global Head of Quality Management, Brown Brothers HarrimanMad rush to quality engineeringSolutions to automate testing have been around for decades. Having spent my 20+ year career in quality management ­ starting out as a testing intern in Bangalore, India, moving on to automation engineer roles and finally into quality management leadership roles in locations such as Singapore and New York City ­ I have led efforts including framework developments, building proprietary automation tools and running automation centers of excellence (COEs) for Fortune 500 companies. Automation done right enables higher quality and efficiency, but over the last few years, there seems to be a trend that is leading some firms down a path of blind proliferation of test automation. Observe how many organizations have transformed quality assurance COEs into quality engineering COEs in a short timeframe. And the number of traditional quality assurance teams that have been reimagined as "all automation'' teams. Most of these decisions seem to be based on notions about agile development and DevOps and are sometimes simply about having a "cool factor." As the pendulum swings towards test automation, firms run the risk of being more interested in automating tests than understanding if the right things are being tested. The cost of automation may exceed current and future benefits. Recruitment is impacted as there are more automation jobs than people with the skill.I am a big supporter of test automation.It is a powerful means to enable better testing. But when it becomes the only strategy, the pendulum has swung too far. Enterprise level automation coverage sounds like an admirable goal. But for organizations with complex and intertwined business lines that have a mix of commercially off the shelf products, distributed applications, and some legacy applications, automating 100% of testing isn't the optimal solution. The return on investment should ensure the costs justify the means.At a Crossroads Over the past ten years as we have assessedautomation at BBH we asked questions such as "What automation coverage do wehave relative to what we need?" and"How many manual testers are on the team?" We knew that an ideological argument overautomation vs.manual testing was not going to help us and we avoided the "automate everything" trap. Weassessed where we were in our own automation journey;we had many strengths:An exceptionally skilled team with deep testing and domain knowledge, a good set of tools, and a robust framework. We also started with a high proportion of manual
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