It's worth noting that this blog post is on the GoCD website; so my expectation is that it's part of a larger theme of making testing upgrades an automated proc

It's worth noting that this blog post is on the GoCD website; so my expectation is that it's part of a larger theme of making testing upgrades an automated process. One thing that makes this hard is that there are so many sources of upstream variability these days. On my current project I am up to ten (or 13, depending how you count) sources of upstream changes that I can think of. And this is only a medium-sized project. My predecessors had 4-5 pairs to work with, so having a chore track humming was a viable tactic, so these could pretty much be handled manually. With 2 pairs and a lot of feature work it's much harder to justify running a chore track every day.