The tree is not arbitrary — the 8 decision points are ordered by their
mean importance score from interviews with industry practitioners
at Sectra Imaging IT Solutions. Points that experts consistently rated as most
important appear first; lower-ranked points only appear if the earlier gates don't
produce a verdict.
F1
Test oracle & determinism is the hard gate.
If a computer cannot reliably evaluate the test result — because outcomes are
non-deterministic, require human judgement, or are full of false positives —
automation is fundamentally broken regardless of any other factor. The tree
stops here immediately with "Don't Automate".
F2
Strong business value is sufficient on its own.
Once the oracle is sound, clear economic benefit plus high-risk/important coverage
is the clearest signal in the research to automate. If practitioners agree,
the tree goes straight to "Automate" without investigating ease or product traits.
F3–F6
When business value is weak, the left branch looks for other justifications.
F3 asks if automation is easy (low maintenance cost). If so, the tree pivots right
to check product characteristics (F7/F8). If not, it continues down:
F4 covers high human-error risk, F5 a knowledge gap, F6 whether it's a
performance/load test — each a standalone reason to automate even without
strong business value.
F7–F8
Product context and test type are the tiebreakers.
Frequent releases, many configurations, or a long-lived product (F7) justify
the long-term investment. Smoke and build-verification tests (F8) run on every
build — their repetition alone makes automation worthwhile even when no other
factor clearly favours it.