Crazy Web Test Automation: “Freedom Is Slavery”

Choose Selenium WebDriver to embrace freedom

Zhimin Zhan
8 min readApr 30, 2021

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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:

  1. WAR IS PEACE
  2. FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
  3. 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)…

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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.