One of the things nobody liked to talk about in public when test automation was slowly "replacing" testers is that if you had the testers write automation, they brought none of the engineering discipline we tend to take as a given to the problem.

It's hard to make tests maintainable. Doubly so if you aren't already versed in techniques to make code maintainable.

I wonder sometimes if we aren't repeating the same experiment with ops right now.