How Could New Automation Frameworks be Worse than Raw Selenium WebDriver?
Few people do real UI test automation, many fake it by toggling frameworks or chasing hypes.
This article title might upset some people. Oh well, we are testers and shall speak with results, objective results like this one. My Selenium E2E test suites have enabled me to do daily production releases for all my web apps, since 2012. Yes, E2E UI test automation is so useful that it makes my Micro-ISV at least 50X more productive than my competitors. The secret: I spend ~70% of SDLC Effort on Software Testing (Real E2E UI Test Automation). Once a software team masters E2E UI Test automation, as this LinkedIn report by Wired, everything is much easier. While it is not the ‘silver bullet’, I believe it comes remarkably close. I heard one elite engineer refer to “Continuous E2E UI Testing’ as the “Holy Grail of Software Development”, and I wholeheartedly agree.
It is a pity that most IT executives, managers, and software engineers do not understand the power of Continuous E2E UI Testing. The reason: they never met a real test automation engineer or witnessed real Agile enabled by daily Automated E2E UI regression testing. To give you an idea of how rare real senior test automation engineers are, even LinkedIn needed to lure one.