test automation
termprogrammingops culture
Letting machines execute tests, so they run on every change instead of when someone has time.
Automation buys repeatability and speed, which is what makes continuous integration possible at all, since nobody manually regression-tests on every commit. The trap is treating coverage percentage as the goal: a suite full of brittle tests asserting implementation details costs more to maintain than the bugs it catches. Unit tests are cheap and fast, end-to-end tests are slow and truthful, and the ratio between them is a real design decision.
Also known as: QA automation, automated testing