Key Challenges Hindering Automated Testing Adoption: Insights from 31 Executives

Industry experts surveyed 31 senior executives from 27 companies to uncover the most frequent problems that block the progress of automated testing.

Corporate Culture

Unclear expectations between development and quality assurance lead to fragile test cases that break with changes, making test durability a challenge.

Organizations often have automation infrastructure but are overwhelmed by noisy broken tests, causing teams to ignore the automation system; active maintenance of tests and surrounding processes is essential.

Legacy software and platforms, coupled with a mindset that treats quality assurance as secondary, hinder the adoption of cloud‑native tools and waste developers' time.

Poor communication between R&D and automation teams can sabotage new automation processes; flexible automation infrastructure that adapts to product changes is needed to minimize maintenance.

Companies need to define and internalize business metrics they want to optimize, focusing on outcomes rather than output, and address the challenges of testing isolated, highly distributed components.

Static scanning tools often lack coverage visibility, and security testing must be integrated with DevOps to avoid isolated silos.

Manual Testing

Transitioning from manual to automated testing requires retraining; manual testers must become test engineers who can write automated scripts.

Education and training are needed to help teams write tests, integrate them into DevOps pipelines, and avoid reliance on time‑ or environment‑dependent manual checks.

Legacy testers struggle to adopt automation and AI‑driven testing, especially as UI becomes more dynamic with features like facial recognition.

Pure manual QA roles become a bottleneck for development speed.

Other Observations

There is growing confidence in front‑end testing, visual diffing, and using screenshots for full‑stack verification.

Automation tools like Selenium are being integrated into CI/CD pipelines, but teams need skills to build maintainable test suites.

Key blockers include skill gaps, infrastructure stability, and misunderstanding of coverage in real‑world user environments.

Rapid technology changes demand continuous updates to test frameworks and code, prompting interest in low‑code or no‑code automation solutions.

Automation results must be visible and trustworthy; poor reporting leads developers to ignore test outcomes.

Security testing suffers from inaccurate results and lack of integrated tools, with security teams often using GRC systems while developers prefer issue trackers.

Educational institutions focus on development rather than testing, creating a shortage of skilled automation engineers.

Effective test automation requires tools that become part of the DevOps toolchain, enabling shared feedback across the organization.

Over‑reliance on automation without regular updates can cause blind spots; tests must continuously validate real user interactions.

The original article was published in May 2018 in Dzone’s DevOps column.