End-to-End Testing: How to Stop the Maintenance Trap - Lilia Gargouri

Forty percent of automation time lost to flakiness and maintenance: that is the reality Lilia Gargouri describes. I talked with Lilia about end-to-end test automation at scale, and what struck me most was how far back the real solutions reach: a single HTML attribute added in 2017 still pays dividends today, simply because the team decided to use it consistently and never change it. We get into the full picture, from how to accurately identify every UI element without XPath gymnastics, to why fifteen well-chosen test cases can outperform five hundred noisy ones, to naming conventions and layered library architecture that keep maintenance from spiraling. And for anyone sitting on an old, flaky test suite right now, Lilia has a concrete answer for where to start.

"Test automation is software development. It's a software project within the big one." - Lilia Gargouri

Lilia Gargouri is known for sustainable, scalable, and efficient quality assurance in complex e-government projects. She is committed to accessibility, trains career changers, and is a passionate advocate for greater visibility and equal opportunities for women in IT. As the inventor of a model-based low-code tool for test automation, she has significantly simplified and accelerated quality assurance in critical e-government projects. As a member of the German Testing Board, she actively drives the further development of quality standards in the industry.

Highlights:

• A custom HTML attribute added solely for test purposes, introduced in 2017, still delivers stable, flakiness-resistant element identification years later across a large government application portfolio.
• Scoping the DOM so that only the relevant section exists for the test tool removes ambiguity when identical elements appear in multiple sections, making precise targeting possible without complex selectors.
• Fifteen well-chosen test cases covering the most critical scenarios deliver more sustainable value than five hundred loosely defined ones dragging down execution time and maintenance capacity.
• Sleep-time workarounds accumulate silently: one analyzed project lost two hours per test run to individually small hardcoded waits, a cost eliminated only by building a proper application-busy detector.
• Naming every automation procedure as action plus business label (for example, "enter name") means a new team member can read the test code and navigate the application logic without separate documentation.

📌 Testing is a people business, humanity as a superpower. That is my talk on October 7 at HUSTEF 2026 in Budapest: See programme and tickets