A customer recently brought us a familiar complaint: One specific error was showing up far more than it should, often enough to slow down releases but inconsistently enough that nobody could explain it. Our team could reproduce the error occasionally. But their environment threw it constantly, at a scale we couldn’t match on our end.
Even more confounding, the root cause had nothing to do with the app or test logic.
It was the Selenium version.
The team had installed Selenium 4.14 during setup and hadn’t revisited it. Meanwhile, the Selenium project has shipped more than 30 releases since then, now up to Selenium 4.46, each one patching bugs, closing gaps in browser support, and keeping pace with how Chrome, Firefox, and Safari actually behave today.
Unfortunately, this pattern shows up more than most teams realize. Test frameworks get installed once during onboarding, and once they run, nobody opens the version number again. Selenium and Appium work, so why touch them? The problem is that "working" eventually erodes over time. Browsers ship new versions on an aggressive cadence, and an aging Selenium or Appium build simply doesn't recognize current browser behavior. And mismatches surface as stale element references, unpredictable waits, timeouts, and errors that look like flaky tests but are really compatibility gaps between an outdated framework and browsers it was never built to support.
Once this customer upgraded, the error nearly vanished. No test logic changed, and no new framework replaced the old one — just a version bump most teams could apply in an afternoon.
Consider this your PSA: If you installed Selenium or Appium once and haven't checked the version since, check it now. Run the version command and compare the result against the current release. If there's real distance between the two, plan the upgrade. Read the release notes for anything that affects your setup, then test the new version in a lower environment before rolling it out broadly.
The bigger fix is behavioral. Build a habit around checking versions on a recurring schedule, whether that means a quarterly version review or a standing reminder tied to your release cycle. Since specifics matter less than the discipline, don't let a test framework fall multiple versions behind and start working against you instead of for you. Treat the latest stable release like any other piece of production infrastructure, not a one-time setup step from six months or two years ago.
Keeping automation frameworks current is exactly the kind of maintenance that's easy to deprioritize yet expensive to ignore. It's also the kind of upkeep Sauce Labs takes off customers' plates, so teams can spend their time writing tests instead of patching the environment underneath them.
