Over the past decade, website complexity has grown substantially, requiring much more effort when it comes to testing. While test automation is certainly not a recent technique, it has grown in popularity lately due to the increased complexity of the sites we build.

In fact, many organizations have full teams dedicated just to testing their site. Quality Assurance is an important role for any company that wants to take its technology seriously.

However, having humans manually run through test scripts is time-consuming.

By automating tests, we shift the workload from manual labor to speedy CPUs. Without humans and their need to sleep and eat, we can test our sites on-demand, around the clock.

Wouldn't it be ideal to have a test suite so effective that your QA team focused solely on keeping it up-to-date?

Unfortunately, that's not the reality. 

I've seen, heard, and have been part of many teams that set out after this ideal, only to realize months later that all the effort has provided them little benefit. Yes, they have test automation in place, but it's constantly breaking and causing endless headaches. It seems they either have tests that run well but don't validate much, or have tests that check for everything but are always reporting false errors.

In 2017 I spent the year recording screencasts covering WebdriverIO, a test automation framework that we'll be learning in this book. While I covered the details of the framework quite well (or so I was told), I was left with nagging questions of "is knowing the tool valuable enough?"

Is knowing how to mix colors and hold a paintbrush enough to be able to paint beautiful art?

Does knowing what the 'addValue' command does in WebdriverIO teach you enough to write tests that are effective?

So I'm rebuilding this content. I want to focus on that second part this time around. Yes, it's important to cover the details of commands and code. More importantly though, you need to see how you can combine all that technology to create a test suite that provides actual value.

In this book, I cover not only what WebdriverIO can do, but also how you'll be using it day-to-day. I've built the examples around real-world scenarios that demonstrate how you would actually set things up. It's not just "what", but also "how to get there".

It takes a little more work on my part, and extra effort on your's to get started, but the payoff is there, I promise.