What to automate and what not to, page objects, locator strategy, waits, and flakiness root causes.
3 questions in QA & Testing.
A page object owns locators and the mechanics of interacting with a screen, and nothing else. Assertions, test data and workflow belong in the test, because the moment a page object asserts, the test's intent stops being readable from the test.
A failure has to be diagnosable from its artefacts alone, because nobody can attach a debugger to a CI run: that means assertions that report the compared values, a message naming the business expectation, and captured evidence of the state at the moment of failure. Use this automation answer to show the decision, trade-off, and evidence rather than a memorised definition.
Quarantine and measure before fixing: keep per-test pass history so you can rank offenders and restore a trustworthy signal, then work the root-cause families one at a time. Retries belong in a narrow, logged, budgeted policy, because a blanket rerun turns a real product race condition into a green build.