Comment by mobilene

I've yet to see the automated test suite that replaces a skilled, sapient, human, functional tester. The automation takes away the drudgery of repeating tests, but it takes a skilled human to figure out what risks are in the code and figure out coverage to determine whether those risks are realized. If you have developers write good unit and integration tests, and build their work to their local environment to make sure it basically works, you avoid most of the "throw it over the wall" mentality. You also deliver way fewer needles in the haystack, if you will. Testers are free to look for more impactful bugs manually, and then to automate coverage as appropriate.