Engineering the culture of stability
I'd like to start the current chapter with a personal tale of a past experience. The majority of projects that I worked on had similar situation to what you are probably used to. Typically, the Selenium build is treated as a second-class citizen, not having a single passing build for days or weeks at the time. Eventually, the tests become so embarrassingly riddled with failures and instabilities that any further development is stopped, and the Selenium build is completely ignored.
On my last project I inherited 300 Selenium tests, which were red 90 percent of the time. So, I started to fix them but that was not enough; no sooner that I would fix a broken test, somebody would make a commit that broke another test somewhere else. I did not have a technical problem, I had a cultural problem; nobody but me seemed to care about Selenium tests.
The team that I was a part of was given the task of maintaining builds; with a lot of trial and error, we came up with...
