“OH HAI! The process to perform incremental testing is taking several minutes per iteration. This sucks! Automate this!”

“Automation totally rocks! The process to perform incremental testing is now only about a minute.”

[some period of time lapses]

“OH HAI! The process to perform incremental testing is taking a whole minute per iteration. This sucks! Tune the test harness!”

“Automation tuning totally rocks! The process to perform incremental testing is now a mere 30 seconds!”

[some period of time lapses]

“OH HAI! The process to perform incremental testing is taking a whole half a minute per iteration. This sucks!”

[…]

Lesson: If left to my own devices, I’ll spend more time tuning the testing process than developing the code being tested because it feels more wasteful to do otherwise.