I think this is one of the "dirty secrets" of current software development ... one of those things that pretty much nobody does very well (at least, anywhere I

I think this is one of the "dirty secrets" of current software development ... one of those things that pretty much nobody does very well (at least, anywhere I have seen). My view is that we won't make real progress on proper UI testing until there is a paradigm shift that moves responsibility for creating applications that are fundamentally testable to developers. This is not dissimilar to how the idea of "devops" finally recognised that managing deployments and infrastructure is actually first class development activity. The problem is that testing a system that has not been designed for it is almost fundamentally intractable. I have seen toolkits that auto-generate random ids for every element on the page so that it is almost impossible to hook onto anything within the page as a reliable anchor to identify testable points within the page. Even when those things do exist it is usually only incidental and not an agreed contract b/w developer and test automation engineer. So they will always break unexpectedly etc etc.