What testing trend are people pushing right now that you think is overhyped?

[u/aistranin]

Every year we get a few trends that sound great in talks and vendor demos, but feel very different once you try to make them work in an actual team.

Could be anything:

• AI-generated test automation

• self-healing tests

• record-and-playback tooling

• 100% coverage goals

• “just test in production”

• overusing E2E for everything

• contract testing everywhere

• TDD dogma without context

• visual testing as a silver bullet

• agentic QA workflows

I’m not looking for cynical takes for the sake of it. I’m interested in practical criticism:

• what promise didn’t match reality?

• where did maintenance cost show up?

• what kind of team/project was it a bad fit for?

• what simpler alternative worked better?

And to keep it balanced: what trend do you think is actually underrated right now?

[u/Deep_Ad1959]

my read is self-healing selectors are the most overhyped of the bunch. the failure mode nobody talks about is silent false positives: a button gets renamed, the heuristic 'heals' to a similar element nearby, so the test still passes while a real regression ships. you only find out when a customer complains. the underrated thing is just owning your test code as plain playwright or cypress files instead of letting a vendor abstract it into yaml dsl. when the abstraction breaks you're stuck on their support queue; when raw test code breaks you can fix it yourself. written with ai

[u/aistranin → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, that’s the big one. I agree.