False ‘Selenium WebDriver Cons’

Expose the dirty tricks of fake “automated testers”, who want to hide their incompetence, and justify ‘juggling frameworks’, not doing real automated testing.

Zhimin Zhan
9 min readFeb 8, 2021

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This article is one of the “Be aware of Fake Test Automation/DevOps Engineers” series.

Many test automation framework reviews listed the Pros and Cons of Selenium WebDriver, like the below ones:

Though there are generally more positives on Selenium, the cons listed are so untrue, which inevitably exposed these people’s ignorance to test automation. I am not belittling the authors here, if you had read “How Google Tests Software” book and listened to Gerald Weinberg’s “Testing is Harder than Development”, you would understand: the real test automation engineers are so valuable and so rare, even the top companies like Google and Facebook found it hard to acquire. In a word, these authors made false comments on Selenium simply because they are not good test automation engineers (again, very very rare).

In this article, I will explain why those false “Selenium Cons” are wrong, in a simple, easy-to-understand and objective way.

Table of Contents:  ∘ 'Steep learning curve'
∘ 'No tech support'
∘ 'No reporting capabilities'
∘ 'Not an All-in-One solution' — requires 3rd party tool bindings
∘ 'High Initial Cost'
∘ 'Slow Test Development' due to the script-based Approach
∘ 'Low readability of Test Scripts'

‘Steep learning curve’

Untrue. Please check out my other article showing how easy to learn Selenium WebDriver in minutes, step by step. Here I will just highlight the key facts:

  • Selenium WebDriver dominates web testing in a relatively short time. Please remember, there was no sales pitch and no commissions.
  • Selenium WebDriver is a W3C standard. As per other W3C standards, such as HTML, CSS, and XML, they are all quite easier to learn. I…

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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.