Today I received an interesting email from someone trying to sell an online tutorial on WebdriverIO which posed the following:

"Quick question: What holds you back from writing automated tests?"

Based on my personal experience doing various projects in the wonderful world of software development, here is a list of reasons with which I replied:

• The product is already finished and in production so there's no more budget left for automated testing.
• The platform is legacy software and no one understands how it works.
• We already have an army of functional testers in India who are manually testing everything, and it's cheap.
• You need "technical" people to setup the the automated test environment, and the only technical people we have are developers and system admins.
• Developers hate to write tests and have no time to learn it.
• Most testers are high-level black-box functional testers and are not concerned with the internal details nor are technical enough to understand the underlying software.
• Setting up an automated environment is expensive.
• There are already tons of tests failing and no one gives a damn.
• The CI runs from Jenkins and the guy that set things up is no longer working for us (don't fix whats not broken).
• Managers do not fully understand what automated testing is and how it really works and are therefore unwilling to invest money.
• Automated testing means that the functionality of the complete product is known, however mostly it is undocumented or specific areas of expertise limited to certain privileged individuals.
• We're too busy and have no time.
• Good testers are hard to find, especially those that are technically inclined and/or understand how to write software.
• The product is not stable and is changing too frequently, meaning that time spent invested in writing test scripts that will continuously break is not worth it.