It was really a ludicrous idea, because at the time, we had enough trouble just keeping up with the UI changes.
What I learned was that automation was better for:
- Smoke testing before deploying a build to QA
- Regression testing of existing features
- Performing extremely repetitive testing
- Running performance and stress tests
I've been asked my a couple of companies to automate all the tests, and I surely did try. When I and my team couldn't do it, I tried creating libraries that made automation easy for everybody to implement. I even wrote a keyword based system at one point (thanks, Rafael Santander!).
In addition to the limitations above, I've learned that strategic implementation is critical. OK, so you want me to automate all the regression tests, let's start with the tests that will meet a specific business need. Whether that's smoke tests (and it often is) or tests for strategically important pieces of application under test.
Since those days, a little analysis before hand about the requirements on automation has served me well.
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