Do we still need automated system tests

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I was wondering what other people think. Where I currently work we do a lot of ‘shift left’ testing where QA’s are quite heavily involved in component tests and even unit tests. We also still maintain a suite of system tests - automated end to end tests of a fully stood up system. We are working in a microservices environment.

I was wondering if other feel there is a need for system tests and if so what value they add - which bugs will system tests find which other tests such as unit tests and component tests not find?

I believe the sort of things we find are:

  1. issues with connectivity such as reverse proxy configuration
  2. issues with expiration of tickets such as kerberos
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Hello @tony_dugay!

I use automation tests for regression purposes attempting to answer the questions: Does the product behave as it did before the change? Has the introduction of new or changed code broke existing behavior?

I also use it for the purposes you listed: evaluate configuration settings, evaluate security, and evaluate connectivity in a new environment. These are the things that change the most from environment to environment. The other tests - unit, component, etc. - evaluate behavior and behavior doesn’t change from environment to environment so I would not use them as much.

Joe