Reflections on Reading a Cypress Tester’s Confession

A lesson that should have been learned (or even prevented) much earlier.

Below is a tester’s comment on this Reddit post, “Cypress.io Blocking of Sorry Cypress and Currents” (dated 2023–10).

“I think Cypress.io is a tool in its death throes….

Where I work, there was a guy in 2018 who made an internal video presentation about how awesome Cypress was, and how many of our projects might benefit from adopting it.

And at the end of last year, since that guy was me, I sort of felt obligated to do a follow up internal presentation about my team’s experiences with it (very good at first, very bad by the end), why no project should adopt Cypress anymore, and the reasons that projects using it should consider switching to …

Flaky test identification, possibly-redundant time-wasting analysis… those are (to me) valid things to pay extra for — or not pay for, if the budget gets tight. Paying extra for simply running your tests in parallel, or being locked into one provider for it, is a huge red flag. It means that the better your test coverage gets, the more you have to pay.”

For simplicity, I refer to this tester as X. I think X’s comment is very genuine and believable. Few people admit that their test automation failures were due to their own mistakes. Don’t you agree? However, I think this tester will likely fail in his next test automation attempt. Why? Because I don’t think X hasn’t learned the lesson.

Update 2024–08–11: The “#1 Cypress Ambassador” Is Now Open to Finding Playwright Jobs

The Proper and Logical Way to Choose a Web Test Automation Framework

In many failed test automation attempts, what initially seemed “awesome” often turned out to be “all bad,” just as X described. Why? Because they focused on the wrong things, much like my daughter did when she was in middle school and spent $250 on a hyped-up cool headphone with speakers on top (It is bad for a simple reason: too heavy).

The logical approach to choosing a web test automation framework focuses on two primary factors:

• Web apps developed according to W3C standards

• Tested in the Chrome browser.

In this context, Selenium WebDriver emerges as the most logical choice.

Also, the stability and reliability of Selenium WebDriver have been well-proven. (fakers' evil mudslinging is an act of covering their incompetence.)

“Facebook is released twice a day, and keeping up this pace is at the heart of our culture. With this release pace, automated testing with Selenium is crucial to making sure everything works before being released.” — DAMIEN SERENI, Engineering Director at Facebook, at Selenium 2013 conference.

Facebook Testing Pyramid, from a great presentation, “Continuous Integration at Facebook”