It’s an alluring concept; instead of pulling developers off of feature work or hiring a slew of new test automation engineers, you can contract out test creation and hand over the automated end-to-end (E2E) tests for an in-house team to run and maintain. It seems like it should work. After all, your team may not have time to do the upfront work, but they should be able to handle a little JavaScript if it’s presented to them on a platter, right?
If only wishing made things so.
When your team inherits E2E tests written by someone else, what starts with a simple handoff turns into a backlog of failing tests, incomplete coverage, and integration work your team didn’t plan for. Those tests rarely fit neatly into your pipeline or process. Instead, your team inherits a long-term responsibility with hidden costs. Here’s what that actually looks like in practice.
50% of your test suite will break every six weeks
E2E tests are inherently brittle. Any change to layout, flow, or copy risks breaking them. In products with active front-end development, that happens often. QA Wolf benchmarks show that half of all E2E tests require modification or removal within six weeks without ongoing maintenance.
When contractors are responsible for only test creation, the upkeep falls to your team. They now own any failure and have to debug broken selectors, verify if logic still applies, and decide whether to fix, replace, or retire each test. Most teams don’t budget for that volume of investigation and quickly fall behind.
You only get as much coverage as fits in the contractor’s hours
Contractors are paid to ship within a fixed number of hours. That means coverage is scoped to fit the budget, not your risk profile.
Some aim for breadth. They write fast, shallow tests across happy paths to show progress. Others pursue complex flows that consume hours quickly but barely move the needle on total coverage.
Either way, something gets left out. You get wide coverage or deep coverage, but not both. And if you want both, you’re paying extra for it.
Tests written with the contractor’s own development toolchain won’t integrate nicely with your CI
Unless you specify and supply the tooling and environment requirements upfront, contractors will default to whatever allows them to move fastest. Some vendors only work with their own wrappers, runners, or helper libraries and may not disclose those constraints until delivery.
That often means:
- Custom CLI wrappers around the test framework
- Internal helper libraries or unsupported dependencies
- Preconfigured test IDs or naming schemes
- Local pipelines with no CI integration strategy
Even if the tests are built with Playwright or Cypress, add-ons and abstractions can make the suite incompatible with your stack. Your team may need to:
- Strip out wrappers and rewrite test logic
- Adjust CI configs to match contractor assumptions
- Rebuild orchestration scripts and test data handling
In some cases, the suite can’t run at all without the original dev context. That locks your team into someone else’s tooling—and turns even minor framework changes into expensive rewrites.
Contractor’s limited context about the product leads to gaps in coverage
Contractors aren’t in sprint planning. They don’t see incident reports, support tickets, or real-world user behavior. They test whatever’s in the ticket—and miss everything that isn’t.
To achieve meaningful coverage, your team must translate tribal knowledge into specifications. That means surfacing edge cases, gotchas, and business rules your team usually handles by instinct. If you don’t write it down, it doesn’t get tested.
A ticket might say “successful checkout,” but skip that certain promo codes shouldn’t stack, or that gift cards bypass fraud checks. It might say “admin can update settings,” without flagging that only billing admins should be able to view payment data. Or it might say “user can cancel subscription,” without noting that cancellations within 24 hours of renewal trigger a refund, and enterprise plans require manual confirmation. These aren’t obscure edge cases—they’re real-world behaviors your team knows, but the ticket might not capture. And if the contractor doesn’t have the context, the tests won’t either.
In-house QA’s limited context into how the test was built makes maintenance work difficult or impossible
Once the suite is delivered, your QA team inherits it without context. There’s no mapping to features, no documented rationale for test logic, and no annotations explaining why one flow was tested and another wasn’t.
So when tests fail, QAEs have to guess:
- What was this test actually validating?
- Is the failure significant or merely a faulty selector?
- Should we fix it, delete it, or rewrite it from scratch?
That’s not just maintenance. It’s reconstruction. And the risk of breaking something else in the process keeps engineers from touching the suite at all. Over time, coverage decays because no one feels safe maintaining what they don’t understand.
Creation means discovery, and contractors don’t sign up for that
Outsourcing test creation can work. But not when the model is hourly contractors chasing deliverables.
Hourly contractors bill for output, not outcomes. They’re incentivized to move fast, or dig deep, but never both. But writing good E2E tests isn’t just coding against a spec. It’s discovering what actually matters. It’s learning where users fail, what the business can’t afford to break, and which edge cases live only in your team’s head.
That kind of context can’t be skipped or boxed into a ticket. Someone has to do the work to bring it to the surface. Contractors won’t because that work just slows them down.
If you want real coverage, test creation has to include discovery. And that means partnering with a team that’s aligned with your goals, not just your backlog.
A test suite you can trust requires your team to own the strategy—not just the cleanup.
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