Issue #11 — “The Alert That Froze the Suite”
Issue #11 — “The Alert That Froze the Suite”
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🌟 Bug of the Week: The Alert That Froze the Suite
🕵️ Story:
I kicked off my nightly regression suite. Everything was humming along until… silence. No progress, no failures, no logs. Just a test runner staring blankly at the screen.
When I VNC’d into the test environment, the culprit revealed itself: A humble JavaScript alert box, sitting proudly in the middle of the app:
“Are you sure you want to leave this page?”
The automation hadn’t clicked “OK”. It hadn’t clicked “Cancel”. It hadn’t done anything. The entire suite was frozen — hostage to a single modal.
🔍 Symptoms:
- Tests passed locally, but froze in CI.
- Pipelines timed out without error messages.
- Session video replay showed: one lonely alert.
🧠 Root Cause:
A recent frontend update added a navigation guard using window.onbeforeunload. In CI, the test flow triggered it. But the automation framework didn’t handle native JS alerts, so execution just… stopped.
🛠️ How I figured it out:
- Checked CI container logs: runner was still “alive”.
- Session replay confirmed the blocking alert.
- Verified the code commit that introduced 𝚘𝚗𝚋𝚎𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚎𝚞𝚗𝚕𝚘𝚊𝚍.
✅ Fix:
- Added explicit alert-handling code in the test suite: 𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚛.𝚜𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚌𝚑_𝚝𝚘.𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚛𝚝.𝚊𝚌𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝().
- Updated CI config to fail fast if an alert remains open >10s.
- Dev team refined the UX: guard only triggers on unsaved changes.
📌 Lesson: One Tiny Alert Can Stop an Entire Pipeline
Alerts are like stop signs in automation — if you don’t plan for them, the journey just ends.
🧪 Test Garden Tip: Handle Alerts Gracefully
When testing web or mobile apps:
- ✅ Always include alert-handling in your test utilities.
- ✅ Add timeouts — don’t let an alert stall your suite forever.
- ✅ Distinguish between expected vs unexpected alerts.
- ✅ Record session video or screenshots to spot “silent” freezes.
Bonus: In Appium, alerts can be handled with 𝚍𝚛𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚛.𝚜𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚌𝚑_𝚝𝚘.𝚊𝚕𝚎𝚛𝚝 too — works across both iOS and Android.
💬 Lady’s Log
“Automation doesn’t fear complexity. It fears silence.”
When your suite hangs without errors, look for the quiet culprits — the modals, the alerts, the little pauses that stop giants in their tracks.
— 𝓛𝓪𝓭𝔂 𝓓𝓪𝓲𝓼𝔂 𝓑𝓾𝓰 🐞🌼
📚 Petal Picks
- 🛑 “JavaScript alerts, prompts and confirmations” — Selenium.dev
- 📹 “3 Reasons Your CI/CD Pipeline Isn’t Working As It Should…” — Modern Software Engineering
- 🧰 Tool: BrowserStack Video Recording for catching silent hangs
💌 Next Issue Teaser:
“The Cookie Banner That Wouldn’t Die”
Because sometimes the hardest thing in testing is saying “Accept All”.