How I Accomplished Two Planned 3-month Test Automation Proof-Of-Concepts within 3 and 5 days with Raw Selenium WebDriver?
The claim that “Selenium is old and no good” is a misleading myth. In reality, the root cause of most test automation failures is insufficient skill or experience.
Many software testers (including developers) have heard this: “Selenium WebDriver is good; Selenium is flaky, the new X is much better”. Having worked in test automation for 20 years, I’ve heard that claim countless times. And guess what? Almost every time, the “next big thing” faded away within a few years.
Lisa Crispin, the author of the classic Agile Testing book, observed that too, and those bad sales/marketing people made her “so angry”.
“Selenium WebDriver's dominance in web test automation remains undisputed
My long-time readers know that I like to use facts, so let me start with three recent survey results.
Two independent surveys in late 2023 yielded similar results.
An interesting thing I noticed, a survey was posted by a Cypress tester in LinkedIn’s Software Testing & Automation group (with 350K+ members).
But when the results with Cypress fell far short of expectations, the author deleted the post. That’s not a surprising behaviour from Cypress Testers 👎, every one of them I met was a complete fake, damaging the reputation of Test Automation and Test automation engineers.
“4th Edition Software Testing & Quality Report" (2025-06) shows “Selenium's dominance in web test automation remains undisputed”
Selenium WebDriver is great—and logically, it should be a no-brainer. It’s the only framework that adheres to the W3C standard, the same governing body that defines the web technologies we test against. Moreover, it’s the only automation framework officially supported by all major browser vendors.
How could I Accomplish Two Planned 3-month Test Automation Proof-Of-Concepts within just 3 and 5 days?
For some unknown reason, end-to-end (E2E) test automation proof-of-concepts (POCs) are often set for three months. In my view, the targets are usually quite low—typically just a few dozen acceptance test scenarios. I participated in two such POCs and successfully completed the targets, well ahead of schedule (days instead of months), with results objectively verified by the business.
Some readers might be thinking, “Zhimin, you must be bluffing.” I’m not. Let me give you a few perspectives.
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