Many companies still have discrete test and development teams. This is obviously not an ideal situation, as the test team is usually not completely aware of what the development team is building. This also provides us with additional challenges if the test team is tasked with writing automated functional tests using the web frontend.
The usual problem is that the test team is behind the development team, and how far behind depends upon how frequent development releases are. The thing is, it doesn't really matter how far behind the development team you are. If you are behind the team, you will always be playing catch up. When you are playing catch up, you are constantly updating your scripts to make them work with a new release of software.
Some people may call "fixing their scripts to work with new functionality" refactoring; they are...