The failure starts small
A test that passes 200 times and fails once does not feel urgent. Usually it gets retried, marked flaky, or blamed on CI noise. Then a few more tests start behaving the same way, and the team quietly builds a habit around ignoring red builds unless they are obviously broken.
That is where maintenance drag begins. The suite still exists, the coverage still looks good on paper, but the day-to-day cost rises because every failure needs interpretation. Was it a product regression, a timing issue, a selector change, or a test that has outlived the UI it was written for?
The useful question is not, "How do we make tests never fail?" The useful question is, "How do we make failures meaningful enough that people trust the suite again?"
Why tests decay over time
