Respond to a Disagreement Article, “Fact check: Is Cypress Really Dying?”
A real fact-check. Beware of cunning tricks in technical writing.
In preparing the article “A Follow-up for My Article, ‘Cypress.io is Dying’ After 3 Months”, I found one article that criticized my original article, “Cypress.io is Dying”, by an author with 10K+ followers on Medium.
Fact check: Is Cypress Really Dying?
No, it isn't
Despite many wrongness in the above article, which I will prove in a moment, I have to say some positives about it:
Writing an article instead of posting short comments to a disagreement.
No personal attacks despite a harsh tone.
List some objective benchmarks (but in the wrong way), which I will use to prove he is very wrong.
This is my first article that directly responds to a disagreement. Because I write articles for my daughter and have been enjoying the real benefits (such as daily production releases) of my Test Automation and Continuous Testing approach, others' opinions do really not matter unless the ones show a convincing execution history of a large suite (200+ E2E UI tests) that runs on a daily basis.
Why do I write this debate article, then? I found it is a good educational source of cunning tricks in technical writing, such as “taking out of context”, “deliberately omission”, “twisting the facts”, “fake facts”, “accusing others of their own behaviour”, “misleading”, … etc.
I am a hands-on tester; let’s test the statements in that article.
Table of Contents:
∘ Fact Check the author
∘ 1. Disagree on “the Trend of Playwright is taking over Cypress”
∘ 2. Wrong about “Microsoft’s marketing on its testing tools/services”
∘ 3. Wrong on “Google Trends”
∘ 4. Wrong about “Download Trend”
∘ 5. Quoted Wrong Numbers on Cypress.io revenue and staff numbers.
∘ 6. Wrong Defend Cypress.io funding position
∘ 7. Light-play the ‘Cypress.io’s downsizing’ in misleading ways
∘ 8. Wrong Defend Cypress.io’s “block certain third-party products and services”
Fact Check the author
A serious blogger, like him and myself, ought to be at ease with the opinions (checking and judgement) of others.
I had never heard of the author in the testing community. According to his Medium profile summary, if true, he seems quite active online.
His medium profile (“About”) is empty. I Googled the name but did not find anyone related to software testing or automation.
As a comparison, people can see the following in my Medium Profile:
Achievement in coding, test automation and continuous testing
International award received
Books I authored
Of course, I am not belittling him based on that. There are quiet achievers. However, he seems to like the word ‘fact-check’. Why don’t provide the facts (with links) for his claims in the profile?
I quickly browsed his writing, nearly one per 1 or 2 days, primarily focusing on JavaScript or coding topics, and could not find a slim sign of him doing real test automation. It is fair to assume that he does not maintain several large E2E test suites on a daily basis, unlike myself.
Given that real test automation engineers are extremely rare, even at software giants (see below), unless I can see his daily test automation execution reports like this one, I assume he is not there yet. (He might think himself a good software developer, but there is a huge gap to reach a senior real test automation engineer)
“95% of the time, 95% of test engineers will write bad GUI automation just because it’s a very difficult thing to do correctly”.
- this interview from Microsoft Test Guru Alan Page (2015), author of “How we test software at Microsoft”“In my experience, great developers do not always make great testers, but great testers (who also have strong design skills) can make great developers. It’s a mindset and a passion. … They are gold”.
- Google VP Patrick Copeland, in an interview (2010)“Automated testing through the GUI is intuitive, seductive, and almost always wrong!” — Robert C. Martin, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, on his blog (in 2009)
“Testing is harder than developing. If you want to have good testing you need to put your best people in testing.”
- Gerald Weinberg, software legend, in a podcast (2018)
I firmly believe that genuine test automation knowledge is acquired through daily hands-on practice. When the test automation (and Continuous Testing) is useful, you have to refine and maintain the automated tests on a daily basis.
Before I debunk various points in the mentioned article, I’d like to clarify my original article, ‘Cypress.io is dying’. This prediction stems from analyses and insights gained through years of experience in test automation. It’s important to note that the validity of a prediction shouldn’t be solely assessed based on the present circumstances. Therefore, if the ongoing trends align, the prediction stands justified.
I correctly predicted the failures of many hyped test automation frameworks/tools, such as QTP, PhantomJS, Cross-browser Testing vendors, ProtractorJS, Katalon Codeless Test Automation, Selenium Grid, and Cucumber, at its prime time. Cypress and AI Codeless Test Automation, are yet to be confirmed.
1. Disagree on “the Trend of Playwright is taking over Cypress”
“Typing “playwright cypress migrate” into browser doesn’t give any insight aside from tech bloggers monetizing on both tools” — quoted from the mentioned article
The above statement is wrong. The readers, who have read my recent article, “A Follow-up for My Article, “Cypress.io is Dying” After 3 Months”, would smile. There are clearly more facts to prove he is wrong, so quickly.
In my original article, I posted the Google search results of “playwright cypress migrate” and “cypress playwright migrate”, which showed a unified trend. This author deliberately singled out another search, not including “cypress playwright migrate”.
This author wrote in a way that hinted I received money from Microsoft or under the influence of commercial arrangements. Again, he deliberately omitted my disclaimer. I stated that I don’t like and don’t use Playwright and Cypress. Moreover, to my knowledge, unlike Cypress, Microsoft did not have any monetizing products/services around Playwright.
My long-time readers know that I am a strong advocate for raw Selenium WebDriver in Ruby for web test automation, obviously, I cannot monetize on those. As I said earlier, I write articles for my daughter. I declined all requests with commercial interests to influence my writing.
(This is typical ‘The heart of a villain measures the belly of a gentleman’）
2. Wrong about “Microsoft’s marketing on its testing tools/services”
“maybe on Microsoft investments into marketing.”
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