It almost seems taboo to dismiss automated testing practices this day in age, so it came as somewhat of a shock to read that Delicious Monster avoids it:

To questions about unit and functional testing in general, Mike had a simple reply: we don’t do it. All the testing in the world won’t make your software free of bugs, and there’s just no way to account for things you can’t account for.

Although I’m not a religious practitioner of automated testing, I’m certainly not against it. My only gripe is that it seems that developers sometimes get so wrapped up in building, fine-tuning, throwing away, and re-building their testing systems that the design¹ and usability of the actual application itself ends up taking a back seat.

(1) Not in the “pretty pixels” sense, but rather the “lets think through how a real user will interact with the app and build the interface and functional framework around that”.