The backstory
Three-year project. Almost zero automation. Not because they didn't want it.
At the end of a three-year state government project, someone asked the obvious question during the retro: why didn't we automate more? The answer was simple. The application was complex, full of dynamic IDs and complicated XPaths. Automating it with Selenium would have been a full-time job for one person to keep the tests alive. And there was only one tester on the team, covering four to five developers.
What changed
TestResults kept showing up in search results. So he gave it a shot.
After the retro, he started looking for alternatives. Anything that could actually handle the complexity. TestResults kept coming up. The decision was clear. Within the first hour, he had a working smoke test covering 80% of the first flow.
With Selenium, identifying elements on a single page could take hours. Dynamic IDs, broken XPaths, elements that weren't easy to locate in Java. With TestResults, he captures what's on the screen and moves on. A full Salesforce page, every element identified and mapped, takes 20 to 30 minutes. After that, building test cases is drag and drop.
less effort compared to Selenium
to first working smoke test. No prior experience.
to adjust a test. Down from 15-20 minutes.
The difference in practice
From hours of coding to minutes of clicking
The biggest shift wasn't speed. It was what he could do with his time. Before, maintaining Selenium automation ate up most of his day. A developer adds a new element on a page, and he'd spend 15 to 20 minutes finding and re-identifying elements, rewriting code. With TestResults, to add the new element takes one to two minutes.
On his newest project, he does his regular exploratory testing work, automats regression testing and maintains it easily on top of it. That wasn't possible before. For fixed-bid government contracts with tight budgets and timelines, that's the difference between having automation and not having it.
What he tells his colleagues
He's already showing demos to friends in the testing world. His pitch: Testers who aren't deeply technical can go in and create automated test cases without worrying about the code underneath.
His one piece of feedback for TestResults?
They're underselling it. In his words: "You guys are taking away the clunkiness of Selenium and adding a more direct approach to automating UI. You could probably add more into your advertising."
