“Automate everything — but no time to automate.”
That line, tucked into a Reddit thread about QA pain points, was upvoted more than any other. Why? Because it captures what most testing teams are quietly screaming behind deadlines and Jira boards. QA today is caught in a pressure cooker: expected to move at the speed of DevOps, automate everything, and still manually test every edge case—often with shrinking resources and little time.
But Reddit didn’t invent this frustration. Industry reports, surveys, and testimonials from real QA engineers all point to the same problem. The way we talk about testing—especially automation—is wildly disconnected from how things actually work on the ground.
Let’s talk about that.
The Gap Between Automation Dreams and QA Reality
There’s a fantasy that exists in many product teams: once automation is “done,” QA will magically keep up with every release. Bugs will be caught early, and devs will ship faster with confidence.
The problem? Automation isn’t a switch you flip. It’s a discipline, a process, and—let’s not forget—a time-intensive investment. It requires good infra, planning, and space to fail, iterate, and improve.
Most QA teams don’t get that luxury. They’re given feature deadlines, a backlog of bugs, a vague OKR about “automation coverage,” and maybe—if they’re lucky—an hour a week for training. The result? Test automation becomes a ghost project. It exists in conversation, not in execution.
A 2024 report by Sauce Labs revealed that nearly 48% of QA professionals list “lack of time” as their top obstacle to automation. Not tooling. Not skill. Just time. You can’t build scalable systems in the gaps between bug triage meetings.
The Burden of Doing More With Less
It’s not just about time. It’s about the constant expectation that manual testers should become automation engineers—without actually being given the space, support, or compensation for it.
In team after team, manual QAs are told to start “learning Selenium” or “writing Cypress scripts,” while still being responsible for all regression, exploratory testing, and triaging every bug from staging. Meanwhile, they’re told they’re not “full-stack QA” or “real SDETs,” so pay and authority lag behind.
The result? Quiet burnout. Minimal progress. And a growing sense of being stuck in a role that’s being asked to do everything—but empowered to do nothing properly.
When Automation Fails, It’s the Testers Who Get Blamed
Even in teams that do manage to push test automation forward, the results aren’t always what leadership expects. Scripts break constantly. Environments flake out. Frameworks become bloated and unreadable. Test coverage becomes a number to chase, rather than a reflection of actual quality.
And when it all collapses—when a broken test lets a critical bug slip through—it’s usually QA that takes the fall.
There’s a simple truth we need to accept: bad automation can be worse than no automation. It creates noise, false confidence, and endless cycles of maintenance. And it sucks up the very thing QA already doesn’t have—time.
The Real Cost of “Shift Left”
The tech world loves to throw around terms like “shift left” and “quality at speed.” But shifting left only works when QA is supported from the beginning—when teams invest in automation thoughtfully, and build it into the product lifecycle as a first-class citizen.
Instead, most QA teams are being asked to move faster than ever, cover more ground, and do it all with less help. Some organizations still treat quality like a post-facto checkbox. Others claim to be “DevOps ready,” but haven’t invested in stable test environments or CI/CD pipelines that actually work for QA.
It’s a cultural problem, not just a technical one.
A New Approach: What If Automation Didn’t Need to Be Built?
What if the answer wasn’t just “try harder” or “hire more”? What if test automation didn’t have to be handcrafted, maintained, and patched endlessly?
That’s the question behind a new wave of autonomous QA tools—where AI acts as a real testing teammate, not just another tool to babysit.
Aurick, for example, is an autonomous AI QA engineer that explores your live product, understands UI logic, generates meaningful test cases, executes them in real-time, and files bug reports—without writing a single script. It doesn’t require months of setup or frameworks that break when your design team decides to rename a button.
Instead of “more tools,” it offers something QA teams have been begging for: relief. Coverage without code. Feedback without friction. Time, finally, to breathe.
Quality Can’t Be an Afterthought
Test automation shouldn’t feel like a guilt trip. It shouldn’t sit in the backlog as a forever-stalled initiative. It shouldn’t be an extra unpaid job someone’s doing after hours just to keep the pipeline from catching fire.
QA is a critical pillar of modern software development—but we’ve spent the past decade treating it like an obstacle instead of a partner.
It’s time to stop blaming testers and start changing the system. Automation can be better. And with the right tools, it already is.
Aurick is launching soon.
If you’re tired of hearing “just automate it” with no support, maybe it’s time to let AI carry the weight.
Join the waitlist — and finally test at the speed of modern development.
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