The software testing industry seems to have a recurring habit of rediscovering established practices, giving them fashionable new names, and presenting them as the next big innovation. I find myself wondering: are we actually advancing the discipline, or just reinventing its vocabulary? 1. Shift-left Testing – Discovering What We Already Knew? Reviewing requirements before development, identifying ambiguities in acceptance criteria, involving testers early, preparing test cases before implementation, and identifying defects as early as possible have been established software engineering and testing practices for decades. There is nothing particularly revolutionary about these activities. Yet, suddenly, we have a fashionable new term for them: Shift-left Testing . Are we really discovering something new, or simply giving established practices a new name and presenting them as the next big thing? Good testing has always been about preventing defects rather than waiting for them to appear...
I generally prefer CSS selectors over XPath when writing Selenium locators. CSS selectors are concise, readable, and usually provide everything I need. However, there are situations where XPath is a better fit—particularly when I need to navigate through an element's hierarchy, such as moving from an element to its parent, grandparent, or sibling. This post shows one such real-world example. The Problem I came across a situation where I needed to click a link based on the value of an input field. The HTML structure contained multiple similar groups of elements. The input field and the link I wanted to click were not directly related, but they shared a common parent structure. In the following example above, the input element is highlighted, and I need to click the corresponding anchor ( <a> ) element . The challenge is that there may be multiple similar structures on the page. I therefore need to locate the link relative to the particular input element rather than using a f...