Challenges and Opportunities in Test Automation Adoption: Insights from 14 IT Professionals

Support for automated testing is slow, and there is a lack of technical staff to drive greater adoption, success, and ROI. To understand the current and future state of automated testing, we interviewed 14 IT professionals who are very familiar with automated testing. We asked them, "What is the biggest problem you face with automated testing today?"

Adoption

Lack of adoption. The goal of automated testing is to release code. If security processes stop releases, there is a problem; the code will be kicked out of the automation pipeline. Changing security processes to accommodate issues in a release is necessary, but some issues cannot be fixed in the current version and must wait for future releases. Adopting waterfall security plans and applying agile and security will eventually be eliminated.

How far everyone lags. Test automation has not kept pace with IT development. The "not invented here" mindset slows progress. Automation testing remains very manual, and many have not performed performance testing, which cannot be proven absent.

Even if everyone wants it, only about 40% of tests are automated, the rest remain manual. Automation requires investment; automation engineers are expensive compared with low‑cost manual testing. Hiring skilled personnel and building frameworks leads to higher automation levels, more script execution, and faster ROI.

Automation testing is still seen as a side show, lacking sufficient attention from teams and managers, which prevents its full potential. Test automation needs to be treated as a product with serious investment from the start. Companies that ignore testing advantages may face late‑stage bugs, high fix costs, or high churn.

Skills

Opportunities for automation testing are huge today. Although many tools are available, the biggest challenge is finding staff who can use these tools effectively.

Organizations must provide test environments, including mock services and test data. Regulations such as GDPR require masking personally identifiable information (PII) when using production data for testing.

The abundance of third‑party tools, lack of new features, resource and skill gaps, and insufficient understanding of security vulnerabilities hinder progress. Training developers interested in security is easier than training security staff to become developers; developers can assist remediation with guidance.

Demand for test‑automation professionals exceeds supply. High demand for automation skills and insufficient trained staff lead teams to ask existing developers and testers to create automation projects instead of providing proper training or dedicated time. To address this, a free test‑automation course is being led.

Other

Various tools are available; spend time analyzing which tools meet your requirements and determine the skills needed to use the tools and write automation tests.

Use containers to simplify setting up test environments and running automation tests.

Maintenance and high ownership cost. New features can change designs and break automation, requiring time‑consuming updates.

The biggest concern is that companies may adopt testing technology but miss the business demand for higher, faster, better automation; ROI will not be the sole driver, as customer perception of automation also matters.

End‑to‑end tests remain problematic because they are hard to maintain and run slowly, lacking good alternatives such as Cypress UI testing or sufficient contract testing.

Startups should begin with best practices around test‑driven design, using hardware, software, and logging to gather data, and seek more guidance frameworks.

Collaborate with vendors and try their software to succeed; trust and scalability are essential, but the situation is tough because you often don’t know what you don’t know.

There is an imbalance between automation capability and the coverage teams aim for. More mature organizations can support higher automation levels, but many companies pursue high automation without sufficient maturity, leading to blind pursuit of 100% automation without strategy.

Original article published March 2019 in the DZone community DevOps column.

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