Automation Testing Dilemma - Defects Vs Speed

Let me set the context right before diving into the details of this subject , the stress here would be only on finding defects using automation verses the speed of testing as we all know automation testing has a broad range of benefits apart from speed and quality measured in terms of defects but lets stick only to these parameter's for now.

Its been decades that Software testing has adopted the automation as the way forward for the fast changing market conditions/dynamics and we still seems to be stuck in that loop of deciding what the automation testing or the tools to automate the software being developed are meant for in the real sense of its usability whether its an aid to speed to market or a tool to find defects(which anyway it cannot as far as I'm convinced , may be i might be wrong here!)

Take any standard enterprise or even for that matter a startup , what's the business objective of these two guys would be ? be early to the market with their product with a mindset of right amount of quality built into their product, so its a way of timing the market with a customers need to sustain and eventually build a following (fan following in normal parlance!) like in the case of Apple products which is a cult onto itself.

Now what makes this a success factor is the time and speed with which the products are released to the market and this can happen only through automation across all phases of the developmental life cycle and specially so in the case of testing as its the gate through which quality is defined across organization before the advent of Agile and DevOps and even in these world also to an extent as we speak.

Now what should be the prima facie responsibility of automation testing ? should it be the speed of testing or quality or both ? real time scenario could be the speed of testing to reduce the enormous amount of effort required to complete the regression suite which piles up in no time before we realize it with the growth of the application/product being developed for the customers need and the challenges around it to maintain this on an ongoing basis coupled with the stale scenarios which it carries which has to be optimized for its effectiveness.

Quality of the product being tested using automation tools could be a by-product and not a means onto itself and should not be attributed as a direct outcome as far my personal experience goes since the primary aim of any of automation testing tools is to reduce the amount of time it takes to sail through the huge pile of regression getting added day in and day out for any standard application or product and thereby set aside the time or to put it other way to save the time which could have been lost if done manually and use this time for more meaningful testing say for example exploratory testing which is by far manual in nature.

Now what this means is we are saving time for testing critical flows of the application which might not be possible to automate or even if its done might cost more than what business might expect and thereby finding critical defects first hand and avoid their leakage to the production environment where we all know will cause more harm in terms of the customer satisfaction (and lost face) coupled with the effort to fix and the huge cost associated with it.

Automation testing helps to tide over the manual and acts an a agent to bring quality product or service to the market at the required speed along with other benefits (not discussed here) and thereby enhances the quality of the product or services being tested.

Views please!