Selenium / Scenario
Farewell, WebDriverManager: A Migration Story
The team deletes the driver-management library, trusts Selenium Manager, and six CI nodes go green. Node seven has opinions from 2023.
- Difficulty
- Medium
- Format
- Scenario
- Points
- 150
- Estimate
- 12 min
// MISSION BRIEF
Your Mission
For years the suite bootstrapped drivers with Boni Garcia's WebDriverManager library. After upgrading to a modern selenium-java, someone deleted the library ("Selenium does this itself now") and the migration PR sailed through, on six of seven CI nodes.
Node 7 fails every run with a ChromeDriver version complaint. You have the diff, the failure, and the node audit. Explain what replaced the library, why node 7 still fails, and what the built-in resolver can and cannot do.
// FIRST CONTACT
Battle teaser
First artifact
The migration diff (conceptual)
Why was deleting the WebDriverManager library reasonable at all?
- AMaven now downloads drivers as normal dependencies
- BSince Selenium 4.6, selenium-java ships Selenium Manager, an official built-in resolver that locates or downloads a driver matching the installed browser when you construct a driver with no explicit configuration
- CThe library only ever worked for Firefox
- DModern Chrome no longer needs any driver binary
// SKILL TAGS