Your tests are written in a language nobody at the company understands
Tests do not become worthless overnight. First, the person who wrote them leaves. For a while, someone else continues to repair them by following a pattern: they copy an existing test and change its values. Then a defect appears that cannot be fixed this way, and nobody wants to take it on because they do not properly understand the language.
The test is skipped. Then another one. A few months later, the entire suite is disabled in the pipeline because “it is always red anyway”. Years of work disappear without anyone making a deliberate decision.
Common problem: nobody can maintain the suite
A test suite is not a finished product that simply runs by itself. It is living code that changes with the application. A relevant new feature may require a new test, and a screen change may affect the scenarios concerned.
This means someone must be able to open and modify the suite—not once a year, but as a routine task. If only one person can do it, the suite depends on that person. If nobody can, the suite is no longer alive; nobody has said it aloud yet.
A typical case is a suite written in a different language because that was the approach in the past or because an external supplier used its own stack. The company’s developers now work in Python or TypeScript. The company formally “has” the suite, but in practice nobody touches it.
How to migrate tests to a suitable language
We migrate the suite to a language your team genuinely understands.
We do not translate it line by line. The value lies in the scenarios and assertions—the knowledge you have collected over the years about how the product should behave. That is what we migrate. The code that records this knowledge today is often also what makes the suite unmaintainable, so we do not copy it into the new one.
The target language is not a matter of fashion:
- Python may make sense for a team that already uses it or needs more approachable syntax. Both Playwright and Selenium have official Python bindings, but the specific libraries and integrations need to be compared with the project’s requirements.
- TypeScript is our choice when the tests should live alongside the frontend and be extended by the same team that writes the application. The tests are then in the same repository and language as the production code, and a new feature and its test can be created together.
- Robot Framework may make sense when well-named keywords make scenarios more readable outside the development team as well.
We choose the target language according to the team’s experience, the product’s technology, and the available integrations, not our preference. What matters is which language the team can use to maintain the suite over the long term.
We design the new suite for easier maintenance, with an appropriate layer of page or component objects, stable identifiers, and separate test data. The migration proceeds gradually by priority, and a coverage map identifies which regression scenarios the old suite still checks and which the new suite now covers.
What a readable suite gives you
A suite the team can read. When a test fails, a developer can more easily determine what it verifies. For a relevant new feature, the team can add a test without first overcoming the barrier of an unfamiliar language.
This reduces dependence on one person, whether internal or external. The suite is in your repository, in a language the team knows, and has the agreed documentation. The team’s ability to extend it independently then depends on the handover and the capacity available.
Next step
Tell us what language the tests use today and what language your team works in. Contact us and we will propose a target language and migration order, with the reasoning behind our recommendation.