Introduction

One of the biggest frustrations in automation testing is dealing with flaky test failures.
In our case, most of the failures weren’t due to broken code — they happened because the application under test was still loading when the script tried to interact with an element.

The result?
❌ False negatives.
❌ Time wasted re-running tests.
❌ Reduced trust in automation.

The Problem

• Symptom: Tests randomly fail with errors like “Element not found” or “Element not clickable.”
• Root cause: The platform hadn’t finished loading, so the element wasn’t ready.
• Impact:
  • Increased test flakiness.
  • Slower CI/CD cycles.
  • QA engineers losing confidence in automation results.

The Solution: Dynamic Waits

Instead of using hard-coded static waits (like Thread.sleep(5000)), I introduced dynamic waits.
Dynamic waits continuously check for an element until it appears or a timeout is reached.
This ensures the script only proceeds when the UI is actually ready.
⚡ Result: Test failures reduced significantly. The suite became much more reliable.

Sample Code Snippets

Selenium (Java) with WebDriverWait

Here:

• Instead of sleeping for 5 seconds (maybe too short, maybe too long),
• The script waits up to 10 seconds until the element is visible.

Selenium (Python) Example

Cypress (JavaScript) Example

Cypress automatically retries finding elements until the timeout expires, making it simpler to handle dynamic waits.

Benefits Achieved

✅ Eliminated false test failures caused by slow loading
✅ Reduced test flakiness and re-runs
✅ Faster debugging — failures are real, not platform delays
✅ Improved team confidence in automation results

Best Practices with Dynamic Waits

• Always prefer explicit waits (waiting for a condition) over hard-coded sleeps.
• Use reasonable timeouts (not too short, not too long).
• Keep waits specific (visibility, clickability, text present) rather than generic.
• Apply waits only where needed — don’t overuse them.

Conclusion

Automation testing isn’t just about writing scripts — it’s about making them robust and reliable. By switching from static waits to dynamic waits, we solved one of the most common causes of flaky tests: platform loading delays. This small change had a big impact:

• More stable automation suite
• Faster CI/CD pipelines
• Higher trust in test results

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