When is a site ready for test automation?

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

Short answer: the site should be designed in a way that allows easy and efficient test automation to be implemented.

Simplicity always helps.

The long answer follows.

The majority of times I was involved in a web test automation project, implementing test automation was not easy because the site design was not appropriate. In other words, the site was implemented without thinking on how test automation will be done.

When is the site design not appropriate?

1. The site is built with 3rd party libraries by dragging and dropping components on a page and then customizing them. There was no way of adding custom id attributes to HTML elements in these cases. Which lead to using very bad locators for finding elements.
2. The site is built with 3rd party components by embedding them in code. There was again no way of adding custom attributes to HTML elements.
3. The site uses very long pages instead of multiple small pages. A small page fits much better in the screen than a long one and may not require any scrolling. In contrast, any very long page needs lots of scrolling to see and interact with its elements.
4. The site uses scroll bars inside of the page.
5. The site does not use distinct…