> 5. Testing is still hard: 49% of respondents encounter the most delays during the testing stage of the development lifecycle. > Half of those surveyed calle

> 5. Testing is still hard: 49% of respondents encounter the most delays during the testing stage of the development lifecycle. > Half of those surveyed called out testing as the biggest source of delay in the development process, reflecting an industry-wide struggle to balance the benefits of manual testing with the need for automation. Another example of how the purpose of testing is misperceived. You can't estimate how long it takes to test. It's more useful to simply time-box it. The delays come about for several reasons: * Testing often uncovers previously unknown problems that have affected the value of the product. The stakeholders choose to accept a delay to remedy the problems found. * Manual testers often have insufficient fluency with their tools to enable them to rapidly create data, set up and tear down environments, find patterns in data and generate meaningful reports. * Organisations often emphasise the creation of painstakingly detailed test cases full of duplication. * Dedicated test automation teams often go down the rabbit hole building low-value, high-cost, high feedback latency test harnesses in which tests are translated verbatim into code from manual test cases, driving tests of business logic through slow, flaky, GUI automation. There is a great deal of dysfunction in how testing is perceived, managed and performed - both by practitioners and those who must make decisions based on the outcomes of testing.