Life After Selenium

Selenium has been the unchallenged leader in open source UI testing since 2004. As the web evolved, Selenium adapted and abstracted alongside it. Unfortunately, that abstraction came with performance and reliability penalties. Now, UI testing is understood to be "slow" and "flaky." Test automation architecture was shaped into "pyramids" to avoid the performance penalty. As a result, QA could not shift left because our results were too slow or unreliable. In 2021, there are now open-source alternatives that will make you consider changing your framework as well as your test strategy. Now, your test results can be more reliable than your application-under-test, and your e2e tests can be faster than your unit tests! In this presentation, we'll demonstrate the inherent problems of Selenium and how these new tools solve them. Then, we'll (cross our fingers and) do some live demos with Selenium, webdriver.io, puppeteer, playwright, and cypress. Finally, we'll end with Selenium 4.0 and what it might mean for your current project.