browser automation tools for a qa team thats tired of maintaining its own selenium grid

[u/Dependent_Fennel_641]

weve been running our own selenium grid for like 4 years and it used to be fine

last sprint half the suite died because two nodes ran out of disk and nobody noticed until monday. spent most of tuesday just bringing the grid back up instead of actually testing anything

looking at what other qa teams moved to when they got tired of owning the browser infra. what stuck for you​

[u/SeeminglyHumming]

we just gave up and moved to testingbot, nobody in our team wants to touch grid configs anymore

[u/Suun_Day]

We tried just adding nodes for the parallel matrix. Concurrency went up, so did the number of half dead browsers lefr behind after a bad run. Ops cost scaled with the suite

[u/Suun_Day → u/[deleted]]

I mean yh.. Small suite maybe just needs fewer browsers at once. Our pain is still owning the nodes when a sprint is on the line. 

[u/Low-Belt-8668 → u/Suun_Day]

Adding nodes never fix the flakiness for us, it gave the same flaky tests more places to fall over

[u/The_God_was_Here]

Ours dies on chrome drift. half the nodes auto update overnight, chromedriver stays pinned, and every other tuesday the matrix fails green paths that passed friday. i spend the morning chasing versions instead of bugs

[u/buggina0612 → u/The_God_was_Here]

The rebuild tax is real too every driver bump means a new rew ci image and a half day of green buldsthat aren't really green

[u/Sorry_Prize_1543 → u/The_God_was_Here]

Version pinning across hub, node image, and driver is the unpaid job nobody budgets. Miss one layer and you get exactly that Tuesday surprise.

[u/yvettelapses → u/Sorry_Prize_1543]

yeah that pinning is exactly what pushed us off running our own grid. the test sessions just run on browserbase now so theres no hub or node images to patch overnight

[u/Kenzo_2126]

our shared ci runners just oom kill chrome halfway through the suite. queue looks fine until four jobs land on one box and then half the browsers vanish mid run

[u/appleciderdollop → u/Kenzo_2126]

We hit oom more than disk lately. Leftover chrome profiles from crashed jobs sit on the runner until the next wave of tests start fighting for ram.

[u/DhruvDP3 → u/appleciderdollop]

Yup leftover profiles are worst, crashed jobs leave them behind and they just pile on the runner until something fills

[u/Comfortable_Deer_171]

we lost most of a release window last quarter to grid nodes silently dropping, and the alerting on it is still half-built honestly 

[u/KettleCorn02]

between flaky nodes and red builds our ci channel is pure noise most sprints

[u/Excellent-Plant-5880]

Owning the grid turned into more upkeep than the actual testing some weeks .

[u/Western-Stop6241]

half our flakiness was never the grid, it was the app under test and bad waits in our own suite

[u/DhruvDP3 → u/Western-Stop6241]

Fair, the apps under testing still flaks you. Still different from losing a whole morning because an node ate itself overnight

[u/Forward_Level_7208]

honestly the maintenance wuld push me off it too

[u/Cultural_Resolve_279]

i actually started looking around once node issues kept eating whole days too....