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Fix a suite that breaks on every redesign

You inherit a 200-test Selenium suite. It fails roughly 40 tests after every front-end release, and every failure turns out to be a locator, not a defect. The team has stopped reading the results.

A representative page object:

java

public class CatalogPage {
    private final WebDriver driver;

    public void search(String term) {
        driver.findElement(By.xpath("/html/body/div[1]/div/main/section[1]/div[1]/input")).sendKeys(term);
        driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(".css-8fj20d")).click();
        Thread.sleep(3000);
    }

    public String firstProductName() {
        return driver.findElement(By.xpath("//article[1]/h3")).getText();
    }

    public void addFirstProductToCart() {
        driver.findElement(By.xpath("//article[1]//button")).click();
    }
}

Your task: diagnose every problem you can see, rewrite the page object, and describe how you would roll the fix across 200 tests without stopping feature work. Then answer: "How do you stop this recurring in six months?"

Fix a suite that breaks on every redesign

You inherit a 200-test Selenium suite. It fails roughly 40 tests after every front-end release, and every failure turns out to be a locator, not a defect. The team has stopped reading the results.

A representative page object:

java

public class CatalogPage {
    private final WebDriver driver;

    public void search(String term) {
        driver.findElement(By.xpath("/html/body/div[1]/div/main/section[1]/div[1]/input")).sendKeys(term);
        driver.findElement(By.cssSelector(".css-8fj20d")).click();
        Thread.sleep(3000);
    }

    public String firstProductName() {
        return driver.findElement(By.xpath("//article[1]/h3")).getText();
    }

    public void addFirstProductToCart() {
        driver.findElement(By.xpath("//article[1]//button")).click();
    }
}