Balancing speed and trust in IP automation

I quite often see business leaders going gaga over automation and narratives get built and you end up hearing conversations around 100% automation. The World Quality Report published each year is a testimony to this. Automation plays a vital role in modern testing, but blindly trusting automation can create a false sense of security. While automation accelerates testing, reduces repetitive tasks, and improves efficiency, it’s important to recognize that automation isn’t flawless. Here’s why balancing automation with critical thinking and human insight matters: 1. Automation Excels at Speed and Consistency Automation handles repetitive regression tests, executes large data-driven tests, and ensures consistent results across environments. This frees testers to focus on higher-value tasks like exploratory and usability testing. 2. False Positives and Negatives Still Happen Automation detects known issues but can’t always differentiate between real failures and flaky tests. When scripts pass, it doesn’t always mean the product works perfectly. Similarly, failures might stem from environmental issues rather than actual defects. Solution: Review automation results regularly, rerun flaky tests, and correlate findings with manual observations. 3. Coverage Isn’t Everything High test coverage through automation is great, but coverage isn’t the same as quality. Automation often focuses on happy paths, but edge cases and unpredictable user behaviors are best explored manually. Solution: Use automation for predictable scenarios and leverage human testers for creative, exploratory work. 4. Automation Evolves with the Product Systems are dynamic. A minor UI or logic change can break automated scripts. This isn’t a failure of automation but a reminder that test maintenance is part of the process. Solution: Regularly update and refactor automation suites to align with evolving systems. 5. Automation is a Quality Partner, Not a Replacement Automation complements testing efforts but doesn’t replace the intuition, creativity, and domain knowledge testers bring to the table. Solution: Foster collaboration between testers and automation engineers to combine the best of both worlds. 6. The Real Power of Automation Lies in Strategy Blindly automating everything leads to diminishing returns. Focusing automation on high-risk, high-impact areas yields better outcomes. Solution: Adopt a risk-based testing approach, prioritizing automation where it provides the greatest value. Automation isn’t the enemy – misunderstanding its role is. By blending automation with human judgment, we create resilient, adaptive testing strategies that drive true quality. Let’s appreciate what automation offers but stay vigilant, ensuring it supports rather than dictates our testing efforts. #softwaretesting #softwareengineering #automation #reporting #brijeshsays

Velocity wins headlines. Reliability wins customers. When one tool can crank out a billion accepted lines of code a day, the bottleneck shifts from creation to confidence. Fast is no longer enough. The question is whether you can trust what ships. My playbook for keeping quality ahead of velocity: 1. Automate the obvious. Let AI handle scaffolding, linting, boilerplate. 2. Ruthlessly delete. Remove any redundant code. Simplify. 3. Freeze best practice into reusable modules. Publish a churn formula once, reuse it everywhere, and metric drift dies before it starts. 4. Codify your contribution standards. Help AI ship code you’ll actually accept by writing the kind of guidelines you’d expect from a great hire. 5. Make failures loud and early. Good observability is cheaper than perfect code. Scale isn’t scary if trust scales with it. Nail that balance, and a billion lines a day becomes an advantage, not a liability.

AI is already writing 70-90% of the code at Anthropic. This does not translate to cutting teams. Roles are shifting. Less time on keystrokes, more time on deciding what to build, shaping the architecture, and setting quality bars. Capacity rises, more gets shipped, and human effort concentrates where context and tradeoffs live. Machines draft more. People steer more. Both sides matter. For everyone outside Anthropic, the read is simple. Expect most first drafts to come from a model. Value will come from clear product goals, clean interfaces between components, strong reviews, and fast integration. Some checks can be automated and should be. Others benefit from human judgment where user trust, long-term maintainability, and business context matter. Throughput alone is not the win. Throughput that preserves reliability is. Speed without trust does not scale. You don’t need a long checklist to act on that. Keep work reviewable, keep ownership clear, and detect and fix issues quickly. Treat privacy and security as defaults. If you ship faster this quarter, be able to explain what shipped, why it shipped, and how you would roll it back if needed. This is the direction of travel: more output from models, evolving work for people, and a higher bar for products that stay safe, private, and defensible. This is also the lane we focus on at ActiveFence - helping teams pair acceleration with real guardrails so velocity doesn’t turn into vulnerability. Whether you’re worried about disruption or building with these tools every day, the path forward is the same: raise speed and trust together.