Stick in software testing long enough, and you will see enough ideas come and go to be able to sort out the ones that look promising to work, and the ones that you just hope will go away soon enough so that no manager will pay any of her attention to it. There have been quite a few in the history of software testing, and from my experience the worst things started to happen every time when someone tried to replace a skilled tester with some piece of automation – whether that particular automation was a tool-based approach or some sort of scripted testing approach. A while ago, Jerry Weinberg described the problem in the following way:

When managers don’t understand the work, they tend to reward the appearance of work. (long hours, piles of paper, …)

The tragic thing is when this also holds true for the art of discovering the information about how usable a given piece of software is.