Words we as developers should live by: “Quality comes not from inspection, but from the improvement of the production process.” — W. Edwards Deming
Axiom: “Tests are code.”
Too many organizations treat anything that isn’t coded as disposable. It is obvious that testing is indispensable, yet time and time again we find teams who treat test automation and related material as second-class citizens. The tests are documents of user behaviour, inextricably linked to the requirements produced by the Product organization and connected at the virtual hip to the code used to create the feature.
If it provides value, it should be versioned, maintained, cared for, and respected as though it were a core feature of the product itself. This should include test case specifications, design and technical documentation, and bug reports.