What are the disadvantages of automated testing?

Posted by jkohlhepp on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by jkohlhepp
Published on 2011-10-27T12:56:33Z Indexed on 2012/04/06 17:41 UTC
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There are a number of questions on this site that give plenty of information about the benefits that can be gained from automated testing. But I didn't see anything that represented the other side of the coin: what are the disadvantages? Everything in life is a tradeoff and there are no silver bullets, so surely there must be some valid reasons not to do automated testing. What are they?

Here's a few that I've come up with:

  • Requires more initial developer time for a given feature
  • Requires a higher skill level of team members
  • Increase tooling needs (test runners, frameworks, etc.)
  • Complex analysis required when a failed test in encountered - is this test obsolete due to my change or is it telling me I made a mistake?

Edit
I should say that I am a huge proponent of automated testing, and I'm not looking to be convinced to do it. I'm looking to understand what the disadvantages are so when I go to my company to make a case for it I don't look like I'm throwing around the next imaginary silver bullet.

Also, I'm explicity not looking for someone to dispute my examples above. I am taking as true that there must be some disadvantages (everything has trade-offs) and I want to understand what those are.

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