I remember writing tests in Selenium in the past. Writing them was a horrible experience and some tests were not deterministic. The same test could fail or pass randomly.
The underlying architecture is a bad design for heavy javascript apps in my opinion. The roundtrips between the test runner talking to selenium server talking to selenium driver in a browser and back the other way is slow and so much can change on the page in between steps in your tests. Cypress runs your test code in the javascript process of your browser so I believe theres no or minimal roundtrip lag.
We use `waitFor()` for the UI to stabilize but thats been a hard mental model for devs to follow and as a result we have tons of unnecessary waits in the tests which slows them down. Even things like waiting for a loading modal to disappear before trying to interact with the UI is hard since your code:
`waitFor('.loading-modal', false) // wait for it NOT to exist`
may run BEFORE its even appeared, then fail in the next step when you try clicking on a button and the modal is there now. You can't wait for it to appear first to prevent that, as your code may run after its already come and gone too.
Tons of annoyances or strange behavior like chromedriver doesn't support emojis in inputs, ieDriver had select boxes set value broken at one point, setValue('123') on a field actually does something like 'focus, clear, blur, APPEND 123' so blur logic to set a default value of '0' on your field will result in the final value being '0123' in your tests… just the worst.
While valid that's not typical for many sites- what's th e point of a very short lived pop up? and even if it is part of your page, you can skip the "risky" part of the test and verify it otherwise (logs ? side effects ?) or not at all.
We didn't care about testing the popup at all, it was just breaking our other tests in the following way.
In our UI you could click a 'save' button, then a 'saving…' popup appears, meanwhile the 'save' button goes away and an 'edit' button appears (behind the popup), and when the response comes back it says 'Saved.' in the ui.
A test for `$('div=Saved.').toExist()` in wdio works, it does a waitFor under the covers and polls the UI until that text appears. It doesn't care if theres a popup shown or not.
However moving on to the next step in the tests, `$('button=Edit').click()` throws an error 'element is not clickable' if the popup is visible when it happens to runs. Doing multi-command steps like 'check if popup is there, if not click' in general doesn't work as theres so much latency between commands. You can inject javascript in to the page that does both checks in the browsers js process as a hacky workaround.
We did upgrade our webdriver library partly to get waitForClickable() which based on the name at least sounded like it handle the above, but there were no volunteers to update the 168 instances where waitForLoader() had spread in the codebase :/
I don't know what specific problems you were having, so I can't give more specific advice than that.
At the end of the day, if you can't get stable tests using the WebDriver W3C standard [0], you are doing something weird and overly complex with your web application. End to end testing isn't going to give you an objective right or wrong every time, but it should make you ask the question "Why does this happen?" and the answer is usually "Oh, we are doing something weird".
You need firstly a framework that understands these technologies and then on top of that you want something that offers a structure to capture the common actions and build an automatable view of a page.
For these requirements I have used Geb [1] with the Page Object Model approach with reasonable success - but you still have to approach writing your tests as actual software, not ad hoc random scripting.
I hear it's great for unit testing javascript though.
Humorously enough though, people had never bothered to debug why the tests were failing. One reason was that a backend service crashed. It turned out that quickly deactivating users after doing things in the UI caused stuck threads that ran infinite loops. No one had ever looked at the logs.
This was all before the W3C standardized browser automation, so I guess the situation may have improved a bit.
It sounds like you were approaching the end-to-end tests as an add-on and not part of your production code. If your problem is changing selectors, you need to make sure your developers know that changing selectors is going to make the tests fail and you need to equip them to handle it through tooling.
- spent days/weeks refactoring tests to work with new testing framework - got tests 100% passing locally, passing in CI env - tests fail randomly on other people's machine or in CI - pick new framework, rinse repeat.
Tried cypress, webdriver, jest, etc. Total waste of time.