Protractor, another Automation Framework I rightly avoided, is being Deprecated

Expensive lessons learnt for teams that do not use W3C compliant Selenium WebDriver.

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

Protractor, a JavaScript-based end-to-end test automation framework, became quite popular a few years back with the rising of AngularJS. I did a quick review of Protractor and disliked it.

The official news came in April 2021: Protractor is being deprecated. While I feel sorry for the teams that have invested a lot of effort in Protractor, my advice is to convert them into raw Selenium WebDriver with RSpec.

As a developer who worked on free and open-source software, I have respect and sympathy for Protractor developers.

“Deprecating Protractor is not a decision that is taken lightly by the team.”

It is a shame that Protractor developers chose the wrong language (JavaScript) and lacked the right mindset: they thought they were making Selenium syntax easier. However, it ended up with the opposite effect.

They should have known that the right approach is to use raw Selenium WebDriver in a good scripting language such as Ruby, with Maintainable Automated Test Design.

Selenium WebDriver find_element syntax was created by the W3C experts. It balances flexibility, readability, learning-ability and other attributes perfectly. Unfortunately, some engineers do not understand that. They created another layer of ‘better’ syntax, which actually made it much worse.

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” — Albert Einstein

Let me share a story about Protractor. Several years ago, A company contacted me for help in implementing test automation. A manager there saw my work before and recommended me to his company.

During the meeting, the tech lead stated that they had started test automation using Protractor. Obviously, they faced some challenges or choices and wanted my opinion. I gave out the suggestion directly…