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

WebDriverWait wait = new WebDriverWait(driver, Duration.ofSeconds(10)); 
WebElement element = wait.until( 
    ExpectedConditions.visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("submitBtn")) 
); 
element.click();

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

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By 
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait 
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC 
wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 10) 
element = wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((By.ID, "submitBtn"))) 
element.click()

Cypress (JavaScript) Example

cy.get('#submitBtn', { timeout: 10000 }).should('be.visible').click();

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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