Increased Flexibility – Writing Robust Selectors and Reducing Maintenance

Maintenance is the ever-growing villain of a test automation project. Each release has more tests and more elements that can go stale, causing a test to fail. If you are new to the test automation field, you may not realize just how much maintenance will increasingly impact your project release after release. I (Paul) would like to share with you this story that inspired several unique solutions.

Several years ago, my client’s development team decided to change the entire underlying architecture supporting the application under test. My automation team only became aware of this change when we found nearly all 100 of our test cases suite failed to reach a passing state. In fact, the only test case that passed was the LogIn test we wrote on the first day of the project. We realized that hundreds of element objects had changed their tag name to different types and used different properties. We were...