u/Admirable-Pea-55

Hey everyone. I'm a frontend developer, and to be completely honest, I don't have a deep QA background. But I see a recurring pattern in our workflows: I update a component or a layout, the UI changes slightly, and suddenly a bunch of tests break because of changed locators.

I'm trying to understand the actual cost and frustration of this maintenance loop. A few questions for the QA veterans here:

1. When a UI change breaks your tests, how much time does it actually take to track down the new selectors and fix them?
2. Who usually fixes them in your team? Do QA engineers have to chase down the devs, or is the dev expected to fix the tests before merging?
3. How often does this happen? Is it a daily struggle or just an end-of-sprint annoyance?
4. Have you tried any of those "self-healing" tools? Do they actually work in the real world, or do they just create more noise?

Full transparency: I'm hacking together a side project to auto-fix locators and want to make sure I'm solving a real problem before I spend my weekends writing more code. I'd really appreciate your raw opinions!