| We invested a large amount of time in them recently, and I agree they are terrible to write. We dare not even turn on IE or any other browser, we can't even keep the tests green in Firefox. Really wish we'd used cypress instead as its 100x easier to debug and we're not getting cross-browser benefits anyways. The underlying architecture is a bad design for heavy javascript apps in my opinion. The roundtrips between the test runner talking to selenium server talking to selenium driver in a browser and back the other way is slow and so much can change on the page in between steps in your tests. Cypress runs your test code in the javascript process of your browser so I believe theres no or minimal roundtrip lag. We use `waitFor()` for the UI to stabilize but thats been a hard mental model for devs to follow and as a result we have tons of unnecessary waits in the tests which slows them down. Even things like waiting for a loading modal to disappear before trying to interact with the UI is hard since your code: `waitFor('.loading-modal', false) // wait for it NOT to exist` may run BEFORE its even appeared, then fail in the next step when you try clicking on a button and the modal is there now. You can't wait for it to appear first to prevent that, as your code may run after its already come and gone too. Tons of annoyances or strange behavior like chromedriver doesn't support emojis in inputs, ieDriver had select boxes set value broken at one point, setValue('123') on a field actually does something like 'focus, clear, blur, APPEND 123' so blur logic to set a default value of '0' on your field will result in the final value being '0123' in your tests… just the worst. |
While valid that's not typical for many sites- what's th e point of a very short lived pop up? and even if it is part of your page, you can skip the "risky" part of the test and verify it otherwise (logs ? side effects ?) or not at all.