I work with a team of QA Engineers who do manual testing and automated testing in the form of Selenium and Postman.
We're pretty good with our manual tests, attempting to automate said tests are challenging. There are times in which our testing responsibilities are low, and we have lots of time to create and maintain our tests. Other times, we are swamped with testing which kills any progress we have made.
One solution might be to hire more QA, but I fear they would get dragged into doing more manual testing.
My ultimate goal is to have Selenium smoke tests run when developers open a new PR and nightly regression tests that have most of the tests that we are executing manually
Another solution might be for developers to write their own end-to-end test in addition to their unit tests. Any thoughts on that?
Most online sources suggest hiring dedicated test automation engineers and have manual testers write and conduct test manually and have test automation engineers automated written tests. One online source suggested the opposite that separate teams don't work
Can anyone working on at companies with separate teams chime in with advice over what direction to go and any pitfalls to avoid?