Test Maintenance and Flakiness Prevention Questions

Explain why automated tests become brittle or flaky and describe concrete strategies to reduce maintenance cost and improve reliability. Cover root causes such as fragile selectors, timing and race conditions, dependence on unstable external services, and assertions tied to implementation details. Describe practices such as using stable selectors and application owned test identifiers, avoiding hard coded sleeps, applying page object or component patterns, isolating tests, mocking external dependencies when appropriate, and adding observability like logs screenshots and structured reports to triage failures.