Of course catching bugs early is much, much better and well executed code reviews and TDD are the way to go.

But what do you do if your team struggles to get the basics right? When asking them to write tests results in doubling the code base with trivial module tests finding no bugs and only preventing the all too necessary refactoring? Slowing the team down so much it has to be scaled up? What if the software is not intended to live long?

What if manual tests are the fastest and most reliable way to establish feedback?