Cowardly ‘Automated Testers’ use “GUI Test Automation is hard” as an excuse to avoid, instead do only API Testing

Come on, be a software testing engineer, do test as an end-user would. API Testing is very limited, compared to end-to-end (via UI) test automation. If doing properly, end-to-end (via UI) test automation is not that hard, in fact, fun and quite satisfying.

Zhimin Zhan
9 min readMay 30, 2023

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In a recent LinkedIn chat, one “Automation Engineer” said this:

“ I happen to consider myself a good automation engineer, and I have worked with many other good ones”

“We aren’t supposed to verify everything with the GUI.”

“I think the test pyramid confirms that the GUI test is the most expensive and should only be done for the things that can’t be verified on the layers below”

This view is fairly common by fake automated testers (sadly, too many of them, considered themselves OK, sigh!). It might sound reasonable, but it is wrong.

Table of Contents:
1. ‘The World Quality Report: “ensuring end-user satisfaction is now a top QA priority”
2. Why “end-to-end user testing” is more necessary than ever?
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Zhimin Zhan

Test automation & CT coach, author, speaker and award-winning software developer. Help teams succeed with Agile/DevOps by implementing real Continuous Testing.