Mastering Selenium WebDriver 3.0 - Second Edition

Networks

If you are testing an AJAX-heavy site, network performance will matter. If your AJAX requests take a long time to resolve, the site you are testing will take longer to rerender the frontend as a result of the AJAX calls. Something that works fine on your local machine can suddenly start failing all over the place when you run the same tests on a real server.

If you start looking at all of these potential problems, it soon becomes clear that an arbitrary wait of 5 seconds is never going to be reliable. The reaction some people have when they are faced with this problem is that they extend their waits. Before you know it, you have 10-second waits littered around your test code, then 15-second waits. Before you know it, your simple ...