Living on Crotches or UI Automation Antipatterns
summary
Shows how common UI automation antipatterns — an imbalance of few unit tests vs many flaky UI tests, over-engineered frameworks, and bad practices like 300–500 useless UI scripts, hardcoded credentials/URLs, duplicated Gherkin scenarios and brittle conditional assertions — sink projects. Recommends concrete fixes: map manual test cases to automated suites, parameterize runs via command-line or CI (Maven/CI), extract test-data constants, and add custom matcher messages so failures explain why.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00UI automation intro
- 2:07Testing pyramid antipatterns
- 7:26Antipattern 'And off we go'
- 10:18Positive tests limits
- 12:54Antipattern 'No easy way'
- 17:26Antipattern 'Fill all fields'
- 20:18Gherkin limitations
- 23:49Hardcoded test data
- 26:25Hardcoded config
- 29:18Antipattern 'Something broke'
- 30:44Q&A
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