Why is Object Identification GUI Utility in Test Automation Unnecessary?
Don’t waste time and money on a tool that slows you down and generates inferior test steps.
6 min readAug 4, 2021
This article is one of the “Be aware of Fake Test Automation/DevOps Engineers” series.
In Automated End-to-End Testing, many so-called ‘cool’ features (as below) are either counter-productive or unnecessary:
- Record-n-Playback
- Object Identification Utility
- Test execution recording, e.g. video/screenshots
In this article, I will talk about “Object Identification” (some tool vendors call it ‘Object Map’). I have been developing/maintaining thousands of automated UI (web) tests since 2005, and have never used “Object Identification” utilities(except reviewing).
Test automation vendors often highlight the Object Identification utility as a helpful tool for creating automated tests with ease. In reality, it is unnecessary. As a matter of fact, it will be far better without it.
