Glossary
Test maintenance is the ongoing effort required to keep automated tests working as the application under test evolves - updating selectors, fixing flaky tests, refreshing test data, and adapting to new features.
The World Quality Report found that teams spend 60–70% of their test automation budgets on maintenance, not new coverage. Selenium users report spending 80% of effort on maintenance and only 20% on test creation. The maintenance burden scales exponentially - doubling a test suite roughly triples maintenance effort.
Common approaches: dedicated QA engineers for maintenance, Page Object Model patterns to centralize selectors, regular “test health” sprints, and periodic suite pruning (deleting tests that are more expensive to maintain than the risk they mitigate).
Zerocheck reduces the primary maintenance drivers: selector brittleness through visual interaction and failure investigation through recordings, screenshots, step traces, and run history.