Pages UI Tests Made Easy

Skyscanner's engineering team open-sourced their solution to one of UI testing's biggest pain points: brittle, hard-to-maintain test suites that break with every page change.

The Skyscanner Hotels team built 'pages', a Python library that implements the Page Object Model pattern with two powerful features: component-based architecture and smart asynchronous loading. It's designed to work with Selenium WebDriver but the principles apply to mobile native apps too.

Key Takeaways

• Components are lazily evaluated, preventing StaleElementReferenceException errors automatically
• Nested components enable reusable UI elements like search panels across multiple pages
• Traits system replaces boilerplate WebDriverWait code with declarative loading conditions
• Relative XPath locators keep component tests isolated and maintainable
• Built-in Table component handles common list/grid patterns with minimal code

The article includes real code examples showing how Skyscanner models complex flight search results with just a few lines of reusable component definitions.