

Test automation is a critical part of quality assurance. It accelerates delivery, tightens feedback loops, and makes continuous deployment safe. It also has real limits. Getting the mix right is the difference between testing as a matter of course, and testing as a strategic advantage.
Test automation provides several key advantages:
Despite its advantages, automation comes with some challenges:
Not all tests should be automated. The following types of tests are ideal candidates for automation:
At the core of Turnstone is a data pipeline that continuously ingests, normalizes, and organizes city parking data, then builds modelled outputs based on that input. Changes happen to upstream data sources regularly, and product code is similarly updated with regular UI and functional improvements.
Manually validating the parking data that appears on the platform’s frontend, across four cities each with multiple permutations of date and time, took up to eight hours of focused testing.
We built a Selenium script to handle this task efficiently. Here’s how it works:
With this automation in place, eight hours of manual testing was reduced to an hour of oversight, an 88% reduction that paid for itself within a quarter. The results are all shared, giving the team confidence in the suite and a basis for continual improvement. And the team was empowered to move on to harder problems.
Some things are best left to manual testing:
A prime example where automation doesn’t make sense is visual review on an evolving UI.
Fonts, colours, spacing, alignment, and the behaviour of dynamic elements like pop-ups and animations are exactly the kinds of details that matter to a finished product and that automated tools struggle to judge reliably. Frequent design updates make snapshot-based visual regression suites go stale quickly, which turns the automation itself into a maintenance burden, potentially wiping out any savings automation creates.
Instead of automation, visual reviews should be done through a combination of manual testing and design tools like Figma, Adobe XD, or screenshot comparison tools. Testers and designers who collaborate well can ensure the UI meets expectations faster and more consistently than automation.
To maximize the benefits of test automation, consider the following best practices:
Test automation is a powerful way to improve efficiency, reduce testing time, and increase software quality, but it’s essential to strike the right balance. Automation is great for repetitive, stable, and high-value tests, but not so for visual review on rapidly-changing UI.
Our Turnstone script saved seven hours of testing per run. Keeping visual review manual avoids maintenance that costs as much as the tests themselves. QA teams who thoughtfully consider what’s worth automating and what isn’t turn testing into a strategic advantage, supporting faster, more reliable, high quality software delivery.
Macie Hatamian is a senior quality assurance lead with experience in both manual and automation testing.