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    Test Automation in Practice

    A practical throughline on test automation — deciding what's worth automating, keeping a suite healthy, and the specific cases (auth, SPAs, cross-browser, visual) that trip most teams up.

    10 partsUpdated July 28, 2026
    Start with Part 1
    1. 01

      Manual vs Automated Testing: When to Use Each

      Part 1 of Test Automation in Practice: automation and manual testing answer different questions — a practical split of what to automate, what to keep human, and where autonomous testing changes the trade-off.

      June 18, 20265 min
    2. 02

      What to Automate First — and What Never to Automate

      Part 2 of Test Automation in Practice: a prioritisation order for test automation — which checks earn automation first, the four questions to ask of any candidate, and the tests you should never bother scripting.

      June 15, 20266 min
    3. 03

      Test Automation ROI: When It's Worth It

      Part 3 of Test Automation in Practice: test automation pays off when the recurring cost of running a check by hand exceeds the cost of automating and maintaining it — how to estimate that, and why maintenance is the term teams forget.

      June 25, 20264 min
    4. 04

      Codeless vs Code-Based Test Automation

      Part 4 of Test Automation in Practice: code-based frameworks give you control at the cost of maintenance, codeless tools lower the barrier but keep the suite — how they really differ, and the third option that removes the suite.

      June 22, 20264 min
    5. 05

      Test Automation Best Practices

      Part 5 of Test Automation in Practice: the practices that keep an automated test suite an asset instead of a liability — from what to automate to how to keep it fast, trusted, and small enough to maintain.

      June 30, 20264 min
    6. 06

      Why End-to-End Tests Get Flaky (and How to Fix It)

      Part 6 of Test Automation in Practice: flaky E2E tests come from four root causes — timing, shared state, brittle selectors, and third parties — how to identify and fix each, and why autonomous testing avoids most of them.

      July 3, 20265 min
    7. 07

      Cross-Browser Testing, Explained

      Part 7 of Test Automation in Practice: what cross-browser testing actually needs to cover in 2026, why the matrix is smaller than it used to be, and how to separate rendering checks from functional coverage.

      July 16, 20264 min
    8. 08

      Visual Regression Testing: What It Catches and What It Doesn't

      Part 8 of Test Automation in Practice: visual regression testing diffs screenshots against a baseline to catch unintended UI changes — how it works, why it gets noisy, and how it complements functional testing.

      July 28, 20264 min
    9. 09

      How to Test Single-Page Apps

      Part 9 of Test Automation in Practice: SPAs move routing, state, and rendering into the browser, which breaks assumptions that older test approaches relied on — what changes and how to test them reliably.

      July 22, 20264 min
    10. 10

      How to Test Authentication Flows

      Part 10 of Test Automation in Practice: auth is where end-to-end tests get hard — sessions, tokens, magic links, SSO, 2FA — what to cover, why it's tricky to automate, and how to do it without scripting every path.

      July 9, 20265 min