Flaky tests, slow pipelines, and brittle locators are the classic pain points of any large Selenium suite. Here are five lessons I’ve learned from scaling test automation inside real CI/CD pipelines — from parallelization strategy to retry logic that doesn’t mask real bugs.
- Isolate test data per run to avoid cross-test contamination
- Use explicit waits, never sleep()
- Tag tests by risk level for smarter pipeline gating
- Centralize locators to survive UI refactors
- Treat test infrastructure as a first-class engineering product