> failures in this code are totally obvious during a smoke test - automated or not. Yes, but if your codebase is large enough then a non-automated smoke test c

> failures in this code are totally obvious during a smoke test - automated or not. Yes, but if your codebase is large enough then a non-automated smoke test can be a very slow process, especially if things are configurable. It would have taken 3-4 days to smoke test all functionality manually at my last workplace. Automated tests could make that 5-10 minutes.