Building a Test Automation Framework From Scratch

For many QA engineers, automation starts with developing a few UI tests. But at some point every growing project faces the same challenges: isolated scripts stop being enough. I experienced this situation while working on a large multi-platform product that included web applications, APIs, and mobile platforms (iOS / Android). The testing process became slower over time because automation was fragmented across different tools / approaches. Some tests were difficult to maintain and others were unstable and onboarding new team members took too much time.

At that point the real problem was not the tests themselves => it was the lack of a scalable framework architecture.

The Initial Problem

The project had several challenges:

• Web UI testing
• API testing
• Mobile testing (Android / iOS)
• CI/CD integration
• Parallel execution requirements
• Growing regression coverage

At first, automation was developed quickly to solve immediate issues. This worked temporarily but after the test suite grew, maintenance became painful.

Typical problems started appearing:

• duplicated locators everywhere
• flaky UI tests
• long execution times
• inconsistent test structure
  The more features the product gained, the more unstable the automation became.

Rethinking the Architecture

Instead of continuing to patch individual tests, I decided to redesign the framework architecture completely.

The main goal was simple:
Make automation easy to scale, debug and maintain. I started by separating responsibilities inside the framework. Instead of placing everything into large “mega classes,” I divided the logic into smaller reusable components:

• Base pages
• Page objects
• UI components
• API clients
• Utilities
• Fixtures
• Reporting modules

This immediately improved readability and reduced duplicated code.

Why Playwright Changed Everything

One of the most impactful decisions was adopting Playwright for web automation. Previously many synchronization problems required explicit waits and complicated retry logic. With Playwright’s built in autowaiting and modern locator system, test stability improved dramatically.

What I personally liked most:

• better handling of dynamic UI
• cleaner locator strategy
• easier parallel execution
• faster execution speed
• improved debugging tools

Instead of fighting the framework, the framework started helping the QA process.

CI/CD and Parallel Execution

Another major bottleneck was execution time. As the regression suite expanded, running all tests sequentially became impractical. Some pipelines started taking hours. To solve this I implemented:

• parallel execution
• Docker-based environments
• CI integration
• automated reporting
• artifact collection for failed tests

This significantly reduced feedback time for developers and testers. One particularly useful improvement was automatic screenshot and log collection for failed tests. Instead of manually reproducing failures, engineers could immediately inspect the evidence attached to the report. That saved an enormous amount of debugging time.

The Human Side of Automation

One thing I learned over the years was that good automation was not only about code quality. It is also about communication.
A framework becomes successful when:

• other engineers can understand it
• new team members can onboard quickly
• failures are easy to investigate
• documentation is clear
• the team trusts the test results

Even technically strong automation can fail if nobody wants to maintain it. Because of this, I spent considerable time improving documentation, naming conventions, and reporting clarity and framework consistency. These improvements were sometimes more valuable than adding new tests.

Building a framework from scratch taught me an important lesson:

Automation is not about writing more tests. It is about creating reliable engineering systems. Today when I design automation frameworks, I focus not only on functionality but also on scalability, maintainability, and developer experience. Modern QA engineering is much closer to software engineering than many people realize. And honestly that is exactly what makes it interesting.

If you need the right technology partner to help your company, schedule a free assessment.