A Few Silly yet Common Decisions Often Lead to E2E Test Automation Failures
Avoid those obvious mistakes.
Fact: most IT professionals do not understand E2E (UI) Test Automation. This is excusable. To my knowledge, no universities offer dedicated courses on E2E Test Automation despite its obvious importance in software development.
End-to-end (vis UI) Test Automation has alarming high failure rates.
“95% of the time, 95% of test engineers will write bad GUI automation just because it’s a very difficult thing to do correctly”.
- the interview from Microsoft Test Guru Alan Page (2015)
“Automated testing through the GUI is intuitive, seductive, and almost always wrong!” — Robert C. Martin, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, on his blog (in 2009)
Wise IT executives should avoid silly mistakes like the following:
∘ 1. Management and Tech Leads mandate a specific automation framework/tool or scripting language.
∘ 2. No rule says “coding language and e2e scripting language must be the same.”
∘ 3. The company mandates using a CI server, e.g. Jenkins, to execute E2E tests.
∘ 4. Putting other heavy-weight processes on automated test scripts
