You know that sinking feeling when a routine release turns into a bug hunt marathon. One minute you’re merging code, the next you’re untangling a cascade of flaky test failures that never should have made it out of staging.
When I started my journey as a Test Engineer more than a decade ago, testing looked very different from what it is today.
We were still at a stage where manual testing was the norm. Every test case was executed step-by-step, documented in spreadsheets, and tracked in shared folders. Automation was aspirational — something teams wanted to "eventually get to".
Then came Selenium.
It felt revolutionary — the ability to automate browser actions, execute across platforms, and integrate into CI pipelines. But it came with its own set of challenges that shaped how many of us think about testing even today.
For the last decade, browser automation has mostly meant:
write selectors → write assertions → maintain scripts forever
Playwright evolved this model with fast execution, cross-browser support, auto-wait, trace viewer, API and web in one tool. But even Playwright is still fundamentally deterministic.
By deterministic, we mean that Playwright used to execute exactly what you tell it to do, in the form of test automation scripts. It did not understand context or intent.
Many teams opt to build their own test automation frameworks using open source tools like Selenium or Playwright. The primary reason being that there's no licensing cost associated with such tools.
But is that the only reason to choose open source tools or is that the only cost associated with using open source tools?
Not quite. In this blog, we’ll uncover the hidden costs of building and maintaining a custom test automation framework and explore why it might not always be the most sustainable long-term strategy.
When apps grow, teams scale, and products mature, engineering leaders turn to test automation to ensure quality at speed. And then the BIG question -
Should we build a custom test automation tool — or adopt an existing solution?
The age-old dilemma of Build vs Buy in test automation is exactly what we will be discussing in this blog. In this post, we’ll break down when it makes sense to build your own test automation framework, the hidden pitfalls to watch for, and why, in most cases, modern off-the-shelf tools might be the smarter bet. Let’s help you make the right call for your team.