The human reasons behind the rise and failure of so many JavaScript web test automation frameworks throughout the last decade

Human reasons might better explain the nonsense.

Zhimin Zhan
4 min readJun 28, 2024

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I have written an article titled “Too Many Failed JavaScript Test Automation Frameworks!”.

https://zhiminzhan.medium.com/too-many-failed-javascript-test-automation-frameworks-fed006da05ec

By the way, I have rescued many failed E2E test automation projects using the aforementioned frameworks by applying the same formula: raw Selenium WebDriver with RSpec.

I have listed the popular frameworks above (there are more out there). Considering that our testing target, the web, has barely changed for over 15 years (HTML5 was released in 2018), this “toggling web test automation framework” behaviour is ridiculous.

As an engineer, I have analyzed the technical reasons behind this issue, such as JavaScript language syntax, node_modules, and Async/Await, among others.

Software development is a human activity. When technical explanations fall short of making sense, human factors must be contributing to…

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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.