The 3 QA Pains That Kill Productivity
Stop wasting time on flaky tests and brittle selectors. Learn the 3 biggest QA pain points (and their root causes) that kill productivity for engineering teams.
At Noet, we talk to quality and engineering teams constantly. While their products are all different, their frustrations are similar.
Teams can't ship faster because they're stuck managing test suites, but they can't slow down without losing to the competition.
Based on these conversations, we've summarised three key problems every QA team faces. See if they sound familiar.
Pain #1: Brittle Selectors
Traditional automation (like Playwright, Selenium, or Cypress) relies on a fragile foundation of code: brittle selectors. These scripts are hard-coded to find specific element IDs, CSS classes, or XPaths.
The moment a developer refactors a component or changes a button's ID, the script fails. The test is broken, even if the feature works perfectly for a human user. This is the first crack in the foundation.
Pain #2: Automated Test Flakiness
This flakiness is a direct symptom of hard-coded, "dumb" scripts. They fail due to:
- Timing Issues: The script runs faster than the page element loads.
- Environment Differences: The test passes on a developer's machine but fails in the staging environment.
- CI/CD Integration Issues: The test runner itself is complex and fails intermittently.
Because the tests are unreliable, trust in the entire automation suite collapses. This forces teams to keep manual testing on staff, which leads directly to the final problem.
Pain #3: Manual Testing as a Bottleneck
This is the final, logical outcome of the first two pains.
Because automation can't be trusted (Pain #2) and is always broken (Pain #1), teams are forced onto heavy manual testing. They spend hours or even days performing manual regression testing before every release, completely defeating the purpose of automation.
This creates the ultimate bottleneck.
It's Not Your Fault, It's the Tools
These three pains aren't separate issues. They are all symptoms of one root cause.
Traditional automation fails because it doesn't understand your application. It only follows a set of rigid, hard-coded instructions. As long as our quality tools are tied to brittle scripts, teams will be trapped in this cycle of high maintenance, low trust, and slow, manual bottlenecks.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are brittle selectors in test automation?
Brittle selectors are locators in test scripts (like element_id or a specific XPath) that are rigid and easily break. When a developer changes the UI, even slightly, the selector no longer finds the element, causing the test to fail even if the feature is not broken.
What's the difference between a brittle test and a flaky test?
A brittle test breaks reliably because of a change in the application (like a changed selector). It's broken and needs to be manually fixed. A flaky test fails intermittently without any code changes, often due to timing or environment issues, making it hard to trust.
What is "maintenance hell" for QA teams?
"Maintenance Hell" is the state where a QA or engineering team spends more time fixing and updating old, broken test scripts (due to brittle selectors) than they spend on testing new features or finding new bugs. Productivity grinds to a halt.
How do brittle tests create a manual testing bottleneck?
When automated tests are brittle (Pain #1), they become flaky and unreliable (Pain #2). The engineering team loses trust in the test results. This forces them to run extensive, slow, and expensive manual regression tests before every release (Pain #3) to confirm the product actually works, creating a massive bottleneck.
What is the root cause of most test automation problems?
The root cause is that traditional automation tools are tied to rigid, hard-coded scripts. These tools don't understand the application, its UI, or the user's intent. They only follow a list of instructions, which makes them inherently brittle and high-maintenance.