Had a long meeting with a test manager last week.  He has spent a lot of time on tools with his team, invested a lot of effort on making his automated test suite work for him and from what I could see done a pretty good job.  He had a number of performance tests done which, again, looked pretty good, good use of the tool, good results coming back.

He then spoilt it for me.  His test case management tool work was equally extensive and he had taken it to the level where every test case was in the tool, the test case execution was done through the tool and the tester had to execute every step which was at the lowest level possible (move mouse to field, enter ) and then record whether actual result met expected result, for every step.  He was proud of the fact that his tool gave him all of his traceability and coverage metrics because of this.

For reasons I can't go into, I was unable to say "do you realise how dreadful this testing is?", my tongue was bleeding from having to bite so hard on it. 

The effectiveness of his testing was based on metrics coming from his tool.  I have never seen this to be true.  The effectiveness of testing has little or no correlation to how well the test management tool works - why can't people see this?