Subtle Reasons that Fake Test Automation Engineers like Headless Browser Testing

Fakers want to hide the fact they cannot do real test automation.

One day, a friend talked about fake E2E Web Test Automation in his company (a well-known one). When he mentioned headless testing, suddenly, I figured out why so many fake test automation engineers like ‘Headless Browser Testing’: They just want to prevent others from seeing test execution in the browser.

Table of Contents:
· Fake Test Automation Engineers Want to Hide Fake Test Automation
· Headless Browser Testing in a Nutshell
· Test Failures only in Headless execution are a pain to debug
· Why do Fakers fear viewable test execution?
· Why ‘headless testing’ might help fake automated testers?
· Why don’t just fire those fake automated testers?
· A Story: ‘headless testing’ and a fake ‘principal software engineer’

Fake Test Automation Engineers Want to Hide Fake Test Automation

Test Automation is the foundation of Agile or DevOps. The most valuable type is Automated End-to-End Testing via UI, which can also serve as regression testing. That’s why it is on the top of the Testing Pyramid.

Image Credit: “Continuous Integration at Facebook” presentation

Few will argue about the above. However, why do you rarely see automated testing execution in software projects? Logically, it is supposed to be visible in every Agile software project. Don’t you think it is a bit odd? The fact is that real test automation engineers are extremely rare.

“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)

“Testing is harder than developing. If you want to have good testing you need to put your best people in testing.”
- Gerald Weinberg, in a podcast (2018)

Automated UI Testing and Continuous Testing are not taught at universities, and software companies rarely seek professional help (mentoring or coaching). Therefore, many software engineers or automated testers fake test automation, and they are everywhere.

It might sound crazy, but UI Test Automation is for people to see, how can you hide it? That’s where ‘headless testing’ comes in.

Headless Browser Testing in a Nutshell

I covered Headless Testing in another article: Headless Browser Testing Clarified. “Head” in the context is from Unix, which means display or UI, as many Unix programs can work without ‘Head’.

Ironically, I heard ‘headless’ most from fake engineers who use Windows, a typical ‘Head’ platform.

Of course, we could still use ‘headless browser testing’ on Windows, which means, we don’t see Chrome (or other browsers) when running automated tests.

The next logical question is: “Why headless? Wouldn’t be nice to see test execution in a real browser?”