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Crazy Web Test Automation: “Freedom Is Slavery”
Choose Selenium WebDriver to embrace freedom
This article is one of the “Be aware of Fake Test Automation/DevOps Engineers” series.
In the all-time classic book “1984”, there are three infamous slogans of the Party:
- WAR IS PEACE
- FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
- IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
Except for #1, the other two crazy ideas can be commonly found in the software testing world, especially automated web apps functional testing. In this article, I will talk about the crazy mindset of “Freedom is Slavery” in test automation.
I have seen many test automation failures, and the №1 technical reason is that projects selected the wrong test automation framework. Please note, I used the ‘framework’, not ‘tool’ here. I will explain this later.
For some projects that were open for alternatives, I rescued them quickly. People there were amazed by my efficiency. At the end of the first day, a typical comment was: “Zhimin did over a month’s work in one day, the first day. How?”. My answer: use the raw Selenium WebDriver which is the most feature-complete, most reliable, most flexible, best supported, future-proof, easiest to learn, most productive, free (in both freedom and pricing), popular and fast test automation framework for web apps.
“Facebook is released twice a day, and keeping up this pace is at the heart of our culture. With this release pace, automated testing with Selenium is crucial to making sure everything works before being released.” — DAMIEN SERENI, Engineering Director at Facebook, at Selenium 2013 conference.
“Selenium WebDriver works well, very well. Accept this fact first, especially for people about to try others.” — Zhimin Zhan
Because Selenium-WebDriver is so easy to learn (in doubt? check this article), most manual testers with one-day training could work on the real tests the next day, under my coaching (there is no…
