Our team’s troubles with hand-written automated UI tests

Photo by Nhu Nguyen on Unsplash

Before you can release a new feature, you need to make sure that your existing features still work. You give each release to the QA team to perform manual regression testing. The testers/QA team have their scripts and spend a couple of days stepping through them on the hunt for regressions and bugs. Over time, you add new features, the scripts grow in size, and so does the time it takes to perform manual tests. Your reliance on manual testing starts to become problematic, and so you start looking for alternatives. Automated UI testing sounds appealing. It seems to promise that you can keep running your same regression test scripts, but replace the hands and eyes of a human with those of an automation framework.

Everyone starts to get really excited about automated UI testing.

• Manual regression testing is a tedious task that everyone is happy to see replaced.
• It frees up the QA team’s time for ad-hoc and exploratory testing.
• When the manual regression testing step takes so much time to complete, small delays can put your release at risk. Perhaps testing needs to be restarted, or the start time is pushed back a few days, or your regression environment needs to share two different releases at the same time.
• Your release cadence is limited by manual…