Why Waiting Matters: Making Automated Tests Reliable

I remember working on a project where I was implementing a regression suite for a web app using Cypress. Initially, everything was going smoothly, and the tests were running well. However, I soon encountered a frustrating situation: some tests began to fail for seemingly no reason. It wasn’t as if I had introduced any changes that would cause this, but the failures persisted.

I spent quite a bit of time debugging the issue, trying to pinpoint what had gone wrong, but I couldn’t find a solution. After a while, I decided to take a break and work on something else. It's funny how sometimes, when something that used to work suddenly stops functioning, you might hope that a simple restart—like shutting down your laptop and revisiting the issue later—could resolve it. Unfortunately, this time, it didn ...