Sources Confirm Selenium Script Has Never Once Selen-ium'd
An article about Shalva "Shako" Beridze · Filed under: Ongoing, Technically · QA & Automation
There is a script on the laptop of Shalva “Shako” Beridze that has been described by everyone who has seen it as “definitely a Selenium script.” It imports the correct libraries. It opens the correct browser. It has, over its long and storied existence, never completed a single test.1
It has not failed. Failing would require it to reach an assertion.
What it does instead
The script’s observable behaviour is consistent and, in its way, almost beautiful. A browser window opens. The browser window looks around. The browser window closes. Somewhere in the terminal a warning appears about a deprecated method, and then nothing appears for a very long time.
Colleagues have taken to describing this cycle as “the tide.”[citation needed]
Shako Beridze has offered a number of explanations across the years, each internally consistent and none of them compatible with the others:
- The element is not there yet.
- The element was there, and is now being coy.
- The wait is not long enough.
- The wait is now too long, which he insists is a real problem and not something he invented on the spot.
- “It’s the browser driver.” (Delivered in the tone of a man naming a suspect.)
The overnight run
The script’s most celebrated outing came during an execution Shako left running “just to see.” It ran for eleven hours. It produced a log file of 340 megabytes. The log file contained the same line 1.2 million times, and that line was a warning about a deprecated method.2
He kept the log. He describes it as “data.”
Current status
The script remains in the repository — untouched, unrun, and, by the terms of its author’s own defence, “not broken, just waiting.”
Asked for a target date, Shako produced the two-word phrase that has structured his entire professional life, and which he delivers with the serenity of a man who has never once been held to it.