Brian Merricks when to automate paper

http://www.testing.com/writings/automate.pdf

.. courtesy of Joseph King.

Directed at QA people. A fairly long paper that says you should only automate those tests that are going to help you.

Interestingly, it ignores the role of testing in development - especially in an agile environment where things are changing constantly. I think the tradeoffs change quite a bit in this environment. Especially as tests give you confidence that things are OK. Confidence gives you permission to make both small and large changes to the code base.