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Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #12 Copy the way they Walk in Handan (邯郸学步)
This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.
Story
A young man from the State of Yan heard that people's walking posture was graceful and elegant in Handan. The young man wanted to make his walking posture look better, so he decided to learn.
He travelled a long way to Handan, where first he saw a young man walking towards him. After allowing him to pass, the young man from Yan soon followed behind him, imitating his strides. When the young man of Handan took a step with his left foot, he took a step with his left foot. He then saw a middle-aged man and thought his posture attractive, too, so he followed and imitated him as well. After that, he imitated a woman’s walking style.
Despite his persistent efforts, he just couldn’t walk the way the Handanners did. After a few months of learning, the young man had spent all the money he had brought. Frustrated, he decided to give up and went home, he found he had forgotten his own way of walking. In the end, the young man had no choice but to crawl all the way back home.
Meaning
Anyone who imitates others slavishly will lose their own originality.
Examples in Software Development
At many companies, I have seen a long list of test automation tools/frameworks that have been or are being used, such as
- Commercial Tools, e.g. Quick Test Pro, Tosca, Ranorex, Sahi Pro, TestComplete, MS Coded UI Test, …
- Scripting-language based frameworks, e.g. Watir, Selenium WebDriver, WebDriverIO, Protractor, TestCafe, Puppeteer, Cypress, PlayWright, …
Except for one or two projects using raw Selenium WebDriver, the result of all others was always the same: complete failure.
Here I ask an often-ignorant question: Why there were so many test automation/frameworks in one company? Keep in mind that the goal and execution of End-to-End test automation are quite clear and easy to understand. I have been conducting Web Test Automation exactly the same way for numerous software projects for over a decade.
