[qaid]

I had a similar situation at my previous company. After rewriting a web app for another team, I started E2E testing and questioned the entire app’s existence and whether the business process could be automated.

After verifying in the server logs that the users never really validated data (always clicking “submit” after a second or two), I discussed this idea with our business analyst and got the go-ahead, and spent another couple of weeks to automate everything.

Long story short, it was a mess. There was actually one piece of the puzzle that they owned that I couldn’t automate away (essentially clicking a button). So when presenting it all to them (via email), the team lied and told us it “wasn’t working” and CC’d our managers and one level up the chain as well. This manual business process stayed with them. They kept the web app tho.

My advice is to make sure this kind of thing is known to management, and to make sure you can prove to them that this entire process can be automated without problems. Or let it go if you don’t think you can handle the backlash.