The Real Reason Your Test Automation Is Failing: Bad Leadership
Test automation isn’t failing because of bad engineers—it’s failing because no one is investing in them.
That’s not a hot take. That’s a painful, persistent truth I see in startup after startup, enterprise after enterprise.
And it’s time we talked about it.
The Villain No One Wants to Name: Neglect
We love to blame the automation strategy, the flaky test runner, or the UI library that changes weekly. But most teams aren’t suffering because of tools—they’re suffering because of underinvestment in the people behind those tools.
The real failure isn’t bad engineers.
It’s leadership underestimating the skill, focus, and strategy required to build and scale reliable quality pipelines—and then starving those pipelines of support.
Let me break this down.
The Hidden Fires QA Engineers Are Fighting
Here’s what I see again and again in organizations that wonder why “QA is falling behind”:
1. No Access to AI Tooling—Let Alone Time to Learn It
Everyone’s talking about GenAI in testing, but how many QA teams are actually given:
- Budget to explore the tools?
- Time to run pilots?
- Support to integrate with existing workflows?
Instead, they’re told to “look into AI” while also maintaining 1,000+ brittle UI tests, chasing production bugs, and running sprint regression manually.
AI won’t magically fix this. But time, trust, and investment in learning might.
2. Training Budgets Are a Fantasy
How many QA engineers have a dedicated L&D budget? How many are encouraged to go to a conference, or even take a course?
Most are hired with high expectations and no support:
“You’re our automation expert, right? Great—can you build a scalable CI pipeline, optimize test selection, and train our new devs on best practices?”
Without mentorship. Without strategy. Without growth.
3. Engineers Are Hired to 'Automate Everything'—But Given No Strategy
Hiring a single QA engineer and expecting them to deliver enterprise-grade automation from day one is like hiring one DevOps person and telling them to rebuild the cloud infrastructure.
I’ve seen job descriptions that ask for:
- Test automation in 3 frameworks
- CI/CD setup from scratch
- Performance/load testing
- Security testing
- Manual test execution
- And “nice to have: LLM test agent experience”
And then no one gives them time to do any of it.
We don't have an automation problem. We have a strategy and prioritization problem.
4. Turnover Is Skyrocketing in QA Roles
The result?
Talented engineers leave. Quickly.
- They burn out trying to maintain what was never sustainable.
- They stagnate because no one is mentoring them.
- They become demoralized watching Dev and Product teams get all the recognition while QA is seen as “just testers.”
And then your team starts again from scratch. Again.
It’s Not Just Me Saying This
A recent Gearset study out of the UK found that 87% of IT teams are facing automation skill shortages, delaying projects by nearly 4 months on average. And that’s just the measurable cost.
The real price? Confidence. Velocity. Innovation.
When test engineers aren’t supported, everything downstream suffers—releases get slower, bugs make it to prod, and the feedback loop breaks.
The Pain No One Talks About
We love to talk about flaky tests.
But we rarely talk about the engineers trying to fix those tests at 11pm—alone, under pressure, and without a playbook.
We rarely talk about the time lost debugging tests in outdated frameworks, on underpowered test infrastructure, with zero strategic guidance.
We rarely talk about how demoralizing it is to be brought in “to automate everything,” only to be buried in maintenance and ignored in roadmap conversations.
That’s the pain we need to surface.
Because flaky tests aren’t a root cause.
They’re a symptom of a deeper problem: no one’s investing in the people building the system.
🛠️ How to Actually Fix This
If you’re a founder, CTO, or engineering leader, here’s what meaningful investment in your QE team actually looks like:
✅ Budget for Growth
- Conferences, training, certifications, tooling pilots
- Not as an afterthought. As part of the roadmap.
✅ Strategic Onboarding & Mentorship
- Pair your QA hires with senior engineers and system architects.
- Set clear priorities: what should be automated, what shouldn’t, and when.
✅ Time to Build Quality
- Give QA engineers space to build reliable pipelines, not just hit sprint velocity.
- Block time for tech debt. Reward stability, not just speed.
✅ Recognition
- QA isn’t a cost center—it’s a confidence engine.
- Celebrate test coverage wins, zero-regression releases, and clean CI runs.
Your Engineers Deserve More
If your test automation is flaky, slow, or failing to scale, it’s not because your engineers aren’t good enough.
It’s because you didn’t set them up to succeed!!!
You didn’t invest in:
- Their time
- Their tools
- Their growth
- Their voice
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