Upon asking James Bach, one of the most influential people in software testing, what it means to test, you will receive the answer that it means questioning the given product by operating and observing it. This enables you to make informed decisions about the product.

This definition of testing is quite far away from what we've been talking about so far, and this is because James Bach is talking about manual testing. The process of manual testing is a creative process in which you study and research, resulting in advice and reports to drive a decision. This doesn't sound very much like automation.

What we've been talking about so far is to use tests to drive the design of our code and also as specification for the product. This is a very proactive approach where we let testing drive the innovation of the product itself in comparison to manual testing, which is a reaction to the product that has been created.

The reasons for using automated tests are as follows: