Article
Automated tests have a running cost: authoring, execution time and the trust erosion caused by flaky failures. Suites that ignore that cost get switched off within a year.
A pragmatic shape
- Dense unit coverage on business rules and calculations
- Contract tests at every integration boundary
- A small, ruthlessly stable set of end-to-end journeys
- Zero tolerance for flaky tests — fix or delete, never mute
Where AI helps today
Generating test data, drafting cases from specifications and triaging failure clusters are all genuine time savers. Deciding what deserves coverage remains a human judgement.