[jniedrauer]

I have experienced all the same problems that they outline. E2E tests require a huge number of human-hours to maintain, they're difficult to debug when they fail, almost always false positives, and bugs still get through anyway. But for many situations, there doesn't seem to be a better solution.

For most early stage startups, it seems that time would be better spent optimizing your deployments, rollbacks, and real time metrics so you can maintain a high velocity and roll back quickly when you make a mistake.

For more safety critical systems, the cost of maintaining E2E tests needs to be built into the total engineering cost for the project. It's a hidden cost that is often way bigger than you'd expect.

[mbrodersen]

Not my experience at all. Having solid end-to-end tests means that I spend 99% of my time adding new features and 1% of my time fixing bugs before deploying. I haven’t had a bug in production for years because of solid end-to-end tests.