"Why do we test software?" seems like a silly question—most people would say, “So we know it works, duh." But there are many other reasons we test our products, as well as many possible benefits besides confirming that a system does what we intended it to do. Figuring out the purpose behind your tests is illuminating.

Web services—the applications that talk to other applications—are generally finished before the GUI, so you can test the business logic before you think about the actual interface. You can improve the quality of your application, find interesting bugs that don’t exist in the GUI, and give web services some love.

When automated tests work perfectly one day but fail for no discernible reason the next, it's easy to get frustrated with automation. But you don't have to stay in the dark. Many of the tools we use today allow us to extend their reach with some custom code. Just use some systems thinking and a little imagination.