Did I mention this was 15 years ago? Software development back then looked very different than it does now, especially in Wincore. There was none of this "Cloud-native development" stuff that we all know and love today. GitHub was just about 1 year old. Jenkins wouldn't be a thing for another 2 years.

In this case the "automated test" flipped all kinds of configuration options with repeated reboots of a physical workstation. It took hours to run the tests, and your workstation would be constantly rebooting, so you wouldn't be accomplishing anything else for the rest of the day. It was faster and cheaper to require 8 devs to rollback to yesterday's build maybe once every couple of quarters than to snarl the whole development process with that.

The tests still ran, but they were owned and run by a dedicated test engineer prior to merging the branch up.