Test automation FAQ

Playwright (free, fast, broad browser coverage) for browser; Appium plus a hosted device cloud only when you actually have a mobile product. Skip paid platforms until your suite is over 1,000 tests or your team is over 8 engineers.

Depends on the estate. SAP / Salesforce / Workday: Tosca, Leapwork, or ACCELQ. Legacy .NET: Ranorex or TestComplete. Greenfield SPAs inside an enterprise: still Playwright; it does not become wrong because the company is big.

At low scale, yes by a wide margin. At very high parallelism on a hosted grid, the picture flips because licence cost stays flat per seat while engineer maintenance grows. The TCO calculator is the place to test the flip-point for your situation.

When the test authors are not engineers (BAs, manual QA leads), when the tested surface area is a packaged enterprise app, or when self-heal would otherwise eat 30 percent of an engineer's week. It rarely beats code-based for greenfield React-SPA shops.

Self-heal is a tool re-resolving an element when the locator drifts. It is real and useful, but vendor claims of 90+ percent heal rates are usually measured against synthetic drift, not real production refactors. Treat self-heal as a productivity multiplier, not a maintenance eliminator.

Most teams of 5-15 engineers run comfortably on 10-20 parallel sessions. Going to 100 is a CI-time decision, not a test-design decision, and the price step is steep on every hosted grid.

BDD is for cross-functional collaboration where the test scenarios are written by non-engineers. If the engineers are also writing the Gherkin, you have added a layer of indirection for nothing. Most teams that adopted BDD in 2018 should re-evaluate.

No. Selenium is the most language-broad runner on the market and is still the safest choice for polyglot test estates. It is losing share to Playwright in JavaScript-led teams, but it is not dead.

An AI agent that proposes new tests based on user-traffic patterns, or that updates tests in response to UI changes. Useful as a coverage extender. Not a replacement for engineering judgement on what to test.

If your suite is over 500 tests and you have at least one full engineer-week per month on flake, yes. The migration ledger lives on the migration-cost page.

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