Chakra The Series - Locator - S1E2 - The art of finding elements in the web world.

The flashback of 2009 was still fresh in Aruni's mind while he was trying to figure out why he had even opened VS Code in the first place.

He stared at the screen. A line blinked like a neon crime scene:

//body/div[3]/div[4]/button

Line number 420. Of course.

He hovered over GitLens.

Author: Rohak Commit: Final final xpath fix Date: April 1st

Aruni froze. “April 1st. Of course. April Fool’s Day. Appropriate.”

He clicked into the file. The code smelled like three-day-old Paan.

He summoned Rohak to his desk. Rohak walked in, sipping Red Bull and looking confident like a man who had just built a framework no one asked for.

Aruni vs. Rohak

Aruni: “Rohak, do you know what this XPath does?”

Rohak: “Sir, of course! It’s the checkout button.”

Aruni: “It’s the entire DOM’s spine traced like a root canal. What tool did you use?”

Rohak: “SmartXPath Pro Plugin! It gives the exact path—no thinking needed!”

Aruni (raising an eyebrow): “Ah, the no-thinking part is working perfectly.”

Rohak: “Sir, even Kaam Debo recommends this in his 7-hour webinar—‘Locate whats covered in any position”

Aruni (mutters): “If you automate nonsense, it’s still nonsense. Just faster.”

He got up and wrote on the whiteboard:

"Auto-locators ≠ Intelligent locators."

"Influencer ≠ Architect."

Flashback

Aruni’s eyes glazed over.

He was back in 2009, building object maps in SilkTest with Button42 as the locator. He remembered feeling proud. He remembered believing he’d solved it all. And he remembered his framework breaking the next day when the developer put the button inside another div.

He whispered:

“Rohak... I was you. I once sold Chuna. Now, I detect it.”

The Burn

Aruni highlighted the line:

clickElement(LocatorUtils.getByXpath("//body/div[3]/div[4]/button"))

Aruni (to the team): “Let’s put a quick fix for this”

He rewrote:

clickElement(LocatorUtils.getByXpath("//button[contains(text(), 'Checkout')]"))

Then turned to Rohak:

“If your locator breaks every sprint, you didn’t write automation. You wrote a time bomb on CI.”

Just Then...

Slack pinged.

Jamaal - Engineering Manager: “We’re switching from Selenium to Playwright next quarter. Please plan migration.”

Aruni sipped his black coffee. Smiled. And muttered:

“The Chuna... never dies. It just rebrands.”

Coming Soon Chakra The Series - S1E3 - Retry - The Myth of Stability Through Repetition.

P.S. This is a fictional story and any resemblance to real people, tools, or influencer webinars is entirely coincidental... or is it?