I want to tell you about a test framework. It was beautiful. It had a custom DSL that read like English. Every Selenium action was wrapped in a helper that handled retries, logging, and screenshots automatically. We had a single custom RSpec matcher that every line of every test ran through — uniform syntax everywhere, […]
The SDET role comes with a built-in awkwardness most people never name out loud. A developer writes code. You find what’s wrong with it. You write that down somewhere — a bug report, a Slack thread, a code review comment — and now it exists, in writing, that the thing they spent two days building
There comes a point in every SDET’s career where the muscle memory has set in. You can spin up a new Playwright project before lunch. You can fix a broken locator in your sleep. You wrote the team’s page object pattern and people still mostly follow it. The framework hums. The suite is green. You
Maybe you’ve been on a manual QA team for a few years and you’re watching the automation engineers get the promotions, the conference invites, and the nicer laptops. Maybe you’re a junior dev who got assigned to “the test framework project” and you’re starting to wonder if this is your thing. Maybe a recruiter slid
There are two camps in the flaky test discourse, and they could not be further apart. The first camp refuses to retry a failed test under any circumstances. To them, a retry is a cover-up — it hides real signal, papers over instability, and lets bad tests stay in the suite indefinitely. The pitch is
Hi, my name is Kevin, and I used to write Selenium tests for a living. I don’t say that with shame, exactly. More the way someone might admit they used to ride a fixed-gear bike to work in the snow. It was a choice. It built character. I wouldn’t do it again. For a long
Welcome to Go Forth and Test Hi. I’m Kevin. This is post #1, so let’s get the awkward introductions out of the way. I’ve been a quality engineer since 2012. Fourteen years of writing tests, building frameworks, breaking things, and occasionally fixing what I broke. I’m a Senior SDET at Ramsey Solutions, and I’ve spent