Why Modern Web Development is a Mess

This isn’t yet another article about the bad parts of JavaScript, the heaviness of your node_modules folder, crazy webpack build times, or thousands of trivial leftpad-like imported modules. I‘d like to look at the modern web from a different perspective.

From the perspective of UI automation.

I was working on UI automation for a while. The task is seemingly simple — simulate user interactions with a web page. It’s useful for end-to-end or performance testing of your application or just pure automation of certain activities. A typical tool for web UI automation is Selenium or any frameworks that use it, e.g. Serenity BDD.

When you write UI automation, you don’t really care about how the web application is written, whether it’s a single page application in React or Angular or just plain old HTML with JQuery. All you care about is, you want to interact with some elements and observe some expected behavior.

Imagine a simple case of clicking two elements in succession, e.g. triggering a combobox to open and then selecting something inside the dropdown that appears.