How self-healing tests actually work

The phrase suggests something magical, and the marketing around it has not helped. The mechanism is more ordinary, and more useful, than the name.

The failure it addresses

A button is renamed, a field moves to a second step, a locator changes. Nothing is broken in the product, and the test fails anyway. Somebody spends an afternoon proving that.

What healing means here

The platform holds a model of the journey rather than a list of selectors. When the interface changes, it re-derives how to complete the same journey and continues and when the journey itself no longer exists, it says so instead of quietly passing.