If you've ever developed in an agile environment, then you should be aware of the importance of automated tests. Continuous, frequent deployment is a big part of agile. It's how you get the feedback necessary to iterate on and improve features.

In the beginning, when your feature set is small, you might be able to get away with manual, full-regression test runs before your deployments. However, as your feature set grows, so does the amount of time required to fully test that feature set. Eventually, you will hit a point where these manual regression runs become an impediment to your ability to deploy frequently, which hurts your agility.

Agile is predicated to have automated test coverage. These automated test runs will shorten your regression testing cycles from potentially days down to tens of minutes (or hours). This will allow you to deploy more frequently and get that feedback that is so important in the agile world. Simply put, if you don't have automated test...