Test automation was meant to help. But speak to most quality assurance (QA) and delivery teams today and you'll hear a different story.
Automation exists – but it's fragile.
It's implemented – but it's slow to maintain.
It's in place – but it doesn't scale.
Many teams are spending more time fixing automation than benefiting from it. In lean environments like South Africa, where QA capacity is constrained and delivery pressure is relentless, that's unsustainable inefficiency and it's more common than most organisations care to admit.
The real problem: We’ve been building the wrong thing
The problem isn't automation itself, it's how we approach it. Too many teams fall into the same trap: investing heavily in sophisticated frameworks that are elegant, flexible and technically impressive. And let's be honest, for the average quality engineer, the thrill is in building the technology.
But that ambition is often disconnected from the actual goal, which is simple: build and run reliable tests that keep pace with change. Modern applications aren't stable. User interfaces (UIs) change frequently. Workflows evolve. Releases are continuous. Yet most automation frameworks are still designed as if stability is the norm.
The result is predictable. Tests break when nothing is actually wrong. Maintenance effort grows quietly, sprint by sprint. Automation becomes a specialist activity. Confidence erodes. Costs increase, and eventually automation becomes part of the problem, not the solution.
What good looks like now
The teams getting this right haven't abandoned automation. They've changed their approach. They prioritise speed to value over framework perfection, resilience over rigidity and accessibility over specialisation.
Automation becomes something the whole team owns, not just a small group of engineers protecting a fragile system they built.
A different approach
This is exactly the problem Teresa was designed to address. Rather than requiring months of framework design and set-up, Teresa enables teams to start generating value quickly. It does this in three key ways.
AI-driven self-healing means tests adapt to UI and workflow changes automatically, breaking the constant cycle of break-fix-maintain that quietly consumes QA capacity.
A low-code, no-code design means test creation is no longer limited to automation specialists. Broader team participation becomes possible without deep technical expertise.
Lastly, by keeping the focus on test creation rather than framework engineering, teams spend their time building coverage and insight, not infrastructure. The result is automation that scales with delivery, not against it.
The question worth asking
There are two versions of test automation. One that is fragile, expensive to maintain, impossible to scale and quietly ignored by the teams it was supposed to serve. And one that becomes embedded, trusted and essential to how delivery actually happens.
Most teams already know which version they have. The harder question is what they're willing to do about it.
If this is hitting close to home
You're probably not short of automation. You're short of automation that works.
Expleo is working with organisations facing exactly these challenges, often with tooling already in place, but not delivering the expected value.
If your team is carrying the weight of automation that isn't pulling its weight, you don't have to figure it out alone. Expleo is happy to chat through where teams typically get stuck and how others have moved forward. Reach out to Jay-Jay.Ngwenya@expleogroup.com.
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