I recently sat down with a potential development partner to discuss our new platform—a complex beast that integrates booking systems, a customer data platform (CDP), an engagement platform, loyalty programmes, Amazon Personalize and dozens of other APIs. When I asked about their automated testing strategy, the room went quiet. Their vague reassurances about “thorough QA processes” told me everything I needed to know. We wouldn’t be working together.
Let me be clear: I’m a CPO, not a CTO. I don’t pretend to understand the intricate details of test automation frameworks or CI/CD pipelines. But I do know what I expect—and more importantly, what our business needs. Manual testing by a QA department at the end of the process? That’s not quality assurance anymore, that’s crossing your fingers and hoping for the best.
Here’s what too many development teams still don’t grasp: I don’t want heroic releases. I don’t want war rooms, late nights, or champagne when deployments succeed. I want releases to be mind-numbingly boring. Because boring means predictable, and predictable means my business keeps running whilst I sleep soundly.
When complexity meets reality
Modern platforms aren’t simple brochure websites—they’re orchestrations of interconnected services where each component can spectacularly fail. Yet despite 60% of organisations reporting significant improvements with test automation (LLCBuddy, 2025), only 24% of companies have automated even half their test cases (DogQ, 2025).
This gap between proven benefits and actual adoption isn’t just embarrassing—it’s costing businesses millions in downtime, emergency fixes, and customers who’ll never return after your checkout process fails during Black Friday. The automation testing market is growing at 17.3% annually (Grand View Research) for good reason: manual testing simply can’t keep pace with modern development, and pretending otherwise is corporate delusion.
The testing hierarchy that actually works
Mature teams understand that quality isn’t something you bolt on at the end like a spoiler on a Ford Mondeo. They build on three levels of automated testing that work together seamlessly.
Unit tests verify individual components work correctly—they’re the foundation, scrutinising the smallest units of behaviour. Integration tests ensure different parts communicate without everything catching fire when your booking system tries to talk to payments, inventory, and notifications. End-to-end tests validate entire user journeys from browsing to purchase to confirmation.
Add Test-Driven Development, where tests are written before code, and you get early bug detection that prevents issues from compounding. It’s not overhead—it’s the difference between building a house with planning permission and hoping the council doesn’t notice your dodgy extension.
“The old model of throwing code over the wall to a QA department is dead. Quality must be built in at every stage, not inspected at the end.”
Why QA departments can’t save you anymore
Here’s what absolutely doesn’t work in 2025: developers writing code in splendid isolation, then lobbing it over to a QA department to “test quality” at the end. That model died with waterfall development, yet too many teams still cling to it like it’s a comfort blanket.
Modern development moves too fast for manual testing bottlenecks. When you’re deploying multiple times a day, you can’t have humans clicking through test scripts like they’re data entry clerks from 1987. When you’re managing dozens of microservices, you can’t rely on manual integration testing. The maths simply doesn’t work, and pretending it does is professional negligence.
Continuous Testing adoption only reached 50% in 2025 (TestGuild)—meaning half of all teams still deploy like it’s 2005. Higher test automation maturity correlates directly with higher quality and shorter release cycles (ScienceDirect, 2022), yet teams continue operating at shockingly low maturity levels.
The questions that reveal everything
When I evaluate partners or teams, I get my CTO to ask four questions that cut through the marketing bollocks:
First: “Show me your test coverage reports.” Anything below 70% for critical paths makes me twitchy. But coverage without quality is like having a security guard who’s blind—technically present but utterly useless.
Second: “Walk me through your deployment process.” I count manual steps like a suspicious auditor. Each one is a potential failure point where someone’s weekend gets ruined and my customers start tweeting angry emojis.
Third: “How quickly can you push a critical fix?” If the answer involves calling people in from the pub or weekend heroics, they’re not ready for business-critical platforms. Simple as that.
Fourth: “What happens when a test fails?” Mature teams have clear ownership and rapid resolution. Ignored or bypassed failures mean testing is pure theatre—impressive to watch but ultimately meaningless.
Even the heavily regulated BFSI sector represents 15% of the automation testing market (Grand View Research). If banks can automate their testing, what’s your excuse?
The competitive advantage of being spectacularly dull
In platform development, boring is beautiful. The best releases are the ones nobody notices; especially you.
The most successful platforms share one trait: their operations are mind-numbingly boring. Deployments happen continuously without fanfare, like a reliable commuter train that just works. Systems scale automatically. Issues are caught before customers notice, much less complain on social media.
This isn’t luck or magic—it’s engineering discipline. With the automation testing market valued at $22.2 billion and growing (GMInsights, 2024), the tools exist. The practices are proven. There’s absolutely no excuse for dramatic deployments in 2025 unless you enjoy unnecessary stress and explaining outages to angry stakeholders.
And yes, before you ask—AI can help reduce some of the perceived overhead. I’m told that tools like GitHub Copilot can generate test scaffolding and suggest updates when code changes, making testing less tedious for developers. But don’t expect miracles—AI is a decent assistant for reducing friction, not a replacement for proper testing discipline.
The uncomfortable truth is this: the fastest teams aren’t those who skip testing to “move fast and break things”—that philosophy belongs in a startup graveyard. They’re the teams who’ve automated testing so thoroughly that quality assurance is continuous and invisible, like proper plumbing in a well-built house.
I may not know the difference between Jest and Selenium, or why someone prefers GitLab over Jenkins. But I bloody well know the difference between a team that ships confidently and one that holds its breath every release. I know the difference between a platform I can trust and one that keeps me checking Slack at midnight.
Next time someone pitches you a platform, ask about their testing strategy. If they can’t make deployment sound boring enough to cure insomnia, find someone who can. Your business, your sleep, and your sanity depend on it.