Why Cypress Sucks for Real Test Automation?

(the code-horror image was borrowed from Code Complete book)

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

Note: The sequel to this article “Why Cypress Sucks for Real Test Automation? (Part 2: Limitations)” is now available.(2021–02–15)

Update (2021–04): “Why JavaScript Is Not a Suitable Language for Real Web Test Automation?”.

Update (2022–06–22): “Cypress vs Selenium WebDriver Comparison by Example”

Update (2023–08): “Cypress.io is Dying”

Cypress, a proprietary JavaScript end-to-end testing tool, seems to me that it is an improved Selenium v1 (also based on JavaScript), which was a big hype in 2005 (until it was merged with WebDriver in 2009). I believe many testers had not used Selenium v1 before, what I could tell you is that being replaced by Selenium WebDriver (i.e. Selenium 2) was a good thing.

As a test automation & continuous testing coach, I visited many software projects. I have never seen a single success using Cypress, not even Level 2 of AgileWay Continuous Testing grading (in ‘Practical Continuous Testing’ book), that is:

• A regression suite of 50+ user-story level automated UI tests
• The test suite runs in a CI (or CT) server multiple times a day as regression testing. (otherwise, there was no point doing it)