Reflections on Reading a Cypress Tester’s Confession

A lesson that should have been learned (or even prevented) much earlier.

Below is a tester’s comment on this Reddit post, “Cypress.io Blocking of Sorry Cypress and Currents” (dated 2023–10).

“I think Cypress.io is a tool in its death throes….

Where I work, there was a guy in 2018 who made an internal video presentation about how awesome Cypress was, and how many of our projects might benefit from adopting it.

And at the end of last year, since that guy was me, I sort of felt obligated to do a follow up internal presentation about my team’s experiences with it (very good at first, very bad by the end), why no project should adopt Cypress anymore, and the reasons that projects using it should consider switching to …

Flaky test identification, possibly-redundant time-wasting analysis… those are (to me) valid things to pay extra for — or not pay for, if the budget gets tight. Paying extra for simply running your tests in parallel, or being locked into one provider for it, is a huge red flag. It means that the better your test coverage gets, the more you have to pay.”

For simplicity, I refer to this tester as X. I think X’s comment is very genuine and believable. Few people admit that their test automation…