Preschoolers Can Navigate Websites, Why Do So Many Test Automation Engineers Fail in Web Test Automation?

One reason: complicating things unnecessarily.

A repost of my article on Medium in 2023

Recently, I saw a preschooler use a kids-friendly website swiftly, he could explain his operations, such as “go to the site, click this link, enter a number, click the button, should see X”. Basically, an end-user navigates a website.

This made me think: “Isn’t a web test automation engineer’s main job to automate the operations that a preschooler can perform?”

A preschooler can learn how to use the web quickly means three things:

• Web knowledge (e.g. clicking links, entering text, selecting from dropdown ) is easy to understand

• The web hasn’t changed much in decades

• They can apply what newly learned to any website, i.e., they get proficient quickly

The above aspects apply to test automation engineers, right? To put it simply, a test automation engineer gets paid to perform the same operations that a preschooler can do, using automation scripts.

Please note, I AM NOT SAYING “END TO END (via UI) TEST AUTOMATION IS EASY”, not at all. There are challenges with maintenance, where the effort and skills exceed the team’s capability when a test suite is large. However, given the fixed domain (web changes a little) and super-easy-to-understand target operations (preschoolers can), it is not a big ask for experienced test automation engineers to show daily valid test execution reports of a small test suite, say 50 tests (of course, the app changes consistently as it should be in Agile). Over the last two decades, like Michael Feathers (renowned agile expert, see below), I haven’t yet seen one software project (except mine) achieve that.