Maintenance costs too high

What costs too much when maintaining test automation?

Please select the answer that describes best where you see the highest expense.

1. Updating the automation scripts after changes have been made to the Software Under Test (SUT) and the existing tests either no longer run or give incorrect results. It takes more effort to adapt the existing scripts than to start again.
2. Refactoring the automation scripts in order to improve them or re-design them structurally.
3. Creation or maintenance of test data, where the data used in the automated tests has become "out of step" with the SUT and needs to be updated, or needs to be generated from some other source.
4. People costs have not been budgeted at all or not correctly.
5. Other costs (hardware, software, Networks etc. ) for maintaining automated tests have not been budgeted for or are higher than expected.
6. Changing to a new tool means that we can't use any of our existing tests without major effort. See the issue TOOL DEPENDENCY.

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