From an article on Caterpillar in the August 20, 2007 Fortune magazine: …automation alone is not a substitute for disciplined processes and workflows.

Seems to be pretty applicable to other domains than just manufacturing, including testing.

Witht that I’ll go back to writing selenium based functional tests against a product which does not have any unit tests that run outside of the IDE, has no notion of seed data, a monster-in-the-closet of a build system, routinely has database changes without notification… Not that I don’t think this is completely back-asswards, but one of the chief reasons for automation I list in my intro to qa course is because the boss says to.