depends a lot on the industry and what you're building. Like when I was in the web/startup space, literally nobody worked how you're describing; everyone wrote

depends a lot on the industry and what you're building. Like when I was in the web/startup space, literally nobody worked how you're describing; everyone wrote tests. Transactional systems are naturally testable. It's easy to craft or record http requests and play them back, for example. But now I work in the game industry, and when I talk to game developers, automated testing is seen as being pretty advanced for a lot of the work. The products are extremely stateful, and automating the testing is extremely complex. Real cases that cause bugs are things like "if you stand on this specific rock and strafe to the right and perform a back-jump while z-targeting an enemy to the west you'll clip in between these two other rocks and get stuck". The testing process becomes incredibly hard to instrument, and for that sort of stuff, manual QA winds up being the more common pattern. what's the cost of automated testing? what's the cost of manual testing? what's the cost of NOT testing? The answers to those vary from domain to domain, and from project to project. If the cost of automated testing is lower than the cost of not testing, it's irresponsible to NOT do automated testing. That scenario is extremely common in the design of transaction-handling systems.