Automation Testing: Is this the answer?

All those who are familiar with the field of testing must be knowing what automation testing is. Lets dig into it and find what it is all about and Is Automation testing an answer to every testing problem.

Automation Testing is testing which is done without human intervention.This is the testing assisted with software tools and does not require any operator input,analysis or evaluation.
No doubt we have many advantages like:

• accelerates the test time
• easy to do repetitive testing
• possibility of exhaustive testing
• Better test path coverage

With all these benefits in mind,I can't stop but thinking is Automation an answer to every testing problem? Is it applicable everywhere?The answer according to me is NO. And why is that?

Simply because automation testing has many sub challenges, and is restricted by a number of questions:

• Is the time frame permissible of creating an automation testing framework? Although this makes the testing faster but creating framework takes time.
• Do we have the skilled and sufficient resources to do the job? If the resources are not there,nothing can happen and obviously they cannot be hired at the blink of the eye.
• Does automating will make the process really faster? If a project is not big enough,is it a complete waste spending time and energy on it?
• Up to what level the automation needs to be done?

I have seen this happening a number of times that the decision of using automation and the extent of it becomes debatable. In certain scenarios, we have implemented automation partially because completely automating the task was not worth the effort.

So whatever testing is decided to be used:manual or automated or a super mix,I believe one should always measure all the pros and cons of the process.