Then and Now: The Seismic Shift Happening Today in Test Automation

By Ford Arnett Introduction For as long as I can remember, the automation engineer was the loop, not in the loop. Every step of the test automation process required direct human execution: learning framework syntax from documentation and videos, manually translating requirements into test cases, using inspector tools to find every single element, writing each line of code, and updating documentation separately from the codebase. The human had to do all the work, not just guide it.