10 Test Automation Challenges and How to Fix Them

Most test automation projects start with big plans. Build a framework, automate the regression suite, cut testing time, release faster. A year later, a lot of teams find themselves somewhere else entirely: hundreds of tests that break every release, a handful of people who can fix them, and a regression cycle that still takes days.

The problem usually isn't automation itself. It's the way it's been built. Tests tied to fragile locators, written in code only a few people can read, and maintained by hand will always struggle to keep up with an app that changes every sprint.

In this guide, we'll go through the ten most common test automation challenges, why each one happens, and what actually fixes it. You'll also find a quick self-assessment to see where your team stands, and a practical plan for getting automation back on track.

The 10 Test Automation Challenges

1. Test Maintenance Takes Over

This is the challenge almost every team runs into. Apps change constantly. A button moves, a class name is regenerated, a page is redesigned. Each change can break tests even though the app still works, and someone has to find and fix every one.

As the test suite grows, so does the upkeep. Before long, the people who should be adding new coverage spend most of their week keeping old tests alive, and the suite stops growing.

Why It Happens

Most scripted tests find each element using one fixed locator, like an ID or an XPath. When that one locator changes, the test fails.

// Breaks if the layout or the generated class name changes
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[2]/form/div[4]/button[@class='btn-a91f']")).click();

// Breaks if the layout or the generated class name changes
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[2]/form/div[4]/button[@class='btn-a91f']")).click();

// Breaks if the layout or the generated class name changes
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[2]/form/div[4]/button[@class='btn-a91f']")).click();

// Breaks if the layout or the generated class name changes
driver.findElement(By.xpath("//div[2]/form/div[4]/button[@class='btn-a91f']")).click();

How to Fix It

Use tests that find elements the way a person would, using several clues like the label, the type of element and where it sits on the page. When the UI changes, the tool can usually still find the element, and suggest an updated step for someone to approve.

Keep a person in the loop for those fixes. A test that quietly "fixes itself" might also hide a real bug.

2. Writing Tests Takes Too Long

With traditional frameworks, a single end-to-end test can take days to write, debug and stabilise. Features now ship weekly or even daily, so test writing falls further behind with every sprint, and manual testing fills the gap.

How to Fix It

Remove the coding step where you can. When tests are written in plain English, testers and business analysts can build them directly. Tools that suggest the next step as you write, or draft tests from the requirements you already have, cut the time even further.

3. Flaky Tests

Flaky tests pass one run and fail the next, without any change to the code. They're one of the fastest ways to lose trust in automation. Once people start saying "it's probably just flaky", real failures get ignored too.

Common Causes

How to Fix It

Wait for the thing you need, not a set amount of time. Give each test its own data. Make sure tests can run in any order. And track which tests fail intermittently, so you can fix or quarantine them rather than ignoring every failure.

// Flaky: guesses how long the page will take
await page.waitForTimeout(3000);
await page.click('#confirm');

// Steadier: waits until the button is actually ready
await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Confirm order' }).click();

// Flaky: guesses how long the page will take
await page.waitForTimeout(3000);
await page.click('#confirm');

// Steadier: waits until the button is actually ready
await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Confirm order' }).click();

// Flaky: guesses how long the page will take
await page.waitForTimeout(3000);
await page.click('#confirm');

// Steadier: waits until the button is actually ready
await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Confirm order' }).click();

// Flaky: guesses how long the page will take
await page.waitForTimeout(3000);
await page.click('#confirm');

// Steadier: waits until the button is actually ready
await page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Confirm order' }).click();

4. The Skills Gap

Traditional automation needs programming skills: Java, Python or JavaScript, plus page object models, waits and error handling. People with those skills are expensive and hard to hire.

The result is a bottleneck. When only two or three people on a QA team can write and fix automated tests, everything waits for them. You haven't really automated testing. You've moved the manual work from running tests to maintaining them.

How to Fix It

Choose tools the whole team can use. Plain English tests let manual testers, business analysts and product owners contribute, while engineers focus on the harder problems. The people who know the business rules best can then turn that knowledge into tests directly.

5. Limited Test Coverage

Despite years of investment, many teams still test their most important journeys by hand. Automated coverage tends to stall at the easy stuff, because the complex journeys are the hardest to script and the first to break.

Limited coverage means limited confidence. If you can't check a release quickly, you can't release quickly.

How to Fix It

Start with risk, not volume. List the journeys where a failure would cost the most, like checkout, payments, claims or onboarding, and automate those first. Then make test creation fast enough that coverage can keep growing as the app does.

6. CI/CD Integration

Automated tests are most useful when they run on every change and report back quickly. Many teams struggle here. Set-up is complicated, suites take hours to run, and results are hard to make sense of, so tests end up running nightly or weekly instead.

How to Fix It

Run tests in parallel on cloud infrastructure, so a full regression suite finishes in minutes rather than hours. Trigger them from your pipeline on every change. Make failures easy to understand, with the failing step, screenshots and logs attached, so developers can act on them straight away.

To see how regression tests can run on every release without slowing the pipeline down, take a look at Virtuoso QA's regression testing.

7. Cross-Browser Coverage

Web apps have to work in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge, on desktop and mobile. Testing every combination by hand isn't practical. Automating them with traditional frameworks often means maintaining browser-specific workarounds, which multiplies the upkeep.

How to Fix It

Write each test once and run it across every browser and operating system you support, on a cloud grid. Tests that find elements by what users see, rather than browser-specific details, hold up much better across browsers.

8. Test Data

Realistic tests need realistic data. Many teams end up with values written straight into their tests, which break when the environment changes, or a homemade data set-up that becomes yet another thing to maintain.

How to Fix It

Keep test data separate from test logic, so the same test can run with many sets of data. Create data on demand rather than relying on whatever's already in the environment. And use AI to generate realistic data for edge cases, without copying real customer records.

If you're comparing options for this, our roundup of test data management tools covers ten of them side by side.

9. Enterprise Applications

Enterprises don't run one app. They run SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, Dynamics 365, ServiceNow and many custom systems, often all in one business process. Each one has its own quirks, and traditional automation tends to need a specialist for each.

That creates silos. The Salesforce test team can't help with SAP, the SAP specialists can't help with the custom portal, and journeys that cross several systems fall between the gaps.

How to Fix It

Build tests from reusable building blocks, like "create a customer" or "approve a purchase order", that can be shared across teams and journeys. Use one approach for every browser-based system, so a journey that starts in Salesforce and ends in SAP can be tested in one go.

For Dynamics 365 and SAP, Virtuoso QA's composable testing gives you ready-made building blocks, so you start from a foundation rather than a blank page.

And for more on building tests that can be reused across journeys and teams, see our guide to reusable test cases

10. Proving the Value of Automation

Sooner or later, someone asks what automation is actually saving. Many teams can't answer, because they never measured where they started. Without numbers, automation looks like a cost rather than an investment, and budgets get cut.

How to Fix It

Measure a few things from day one, and keep tracking them:

A Quick Way to Estimate Upkeep Cost

Here's a simple illustrative calculation. Plug in your own numbers.

Halving that upkeep would free up more than 2,000 hours a year to spend on new coverage instead.

Quick Self-Assessment: Where Does Your Team Stand?

Answer these honestly. The more "yes" answers in the right-hand column, the more your automation is likely to be struggling.

How to Get Test Automation Back on Track

How Virtuoso QA Helps with Test Automation Challenges

To see how this works on your own applications, take a look at Virtuoso QA's AI test automation.

And when someone asks exactly what was tested before a release, Virtuoso QA's release evidence has the answer ready.