February 19, 2026

Why Test Automation Needs Design Patterns - Kostiantyn Teltov

19 minutes

Page Objects, Builders, and Facades: Key Test Automation Design Patterns Explained

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"Design patterns support extensibility of our test automation solutions." - Kostiantyn Teltov

In this episode, I talk with Kostiantyn Teltov about design patterns in test automation. Kosta shows why test code needs the same care as product code. Page Object to cut duplication. Builder to shape data like choosing a burger. Facade as a reception that guides you to the right service. We touch creational patterns and even pools for drivers. DRY, KISS, and YAGNI keep us honest and stop overdesign.

Kostiantyn Teltov was born in Dnipro, Ukraine, and lives in Kraków, Poland, for the past three years.

He has been working in software testing since 2008 and writing code for over 11 years.

His technical background includes C#, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, and Python, and he can speak four languages — though not all my programming and speaking languages are equally good ;-)

He is a strong advocate of the Shift-Left testing mindset and the Testing Pyramid approach.

He is passionate about mentoring and educating others, especially in Test Automation.

In the past, he has lectured IT courses. Today he speaks at webinars, meetups and perform workshops, and regularly write articles on Medium.

Currently, he works as a QA Lead at Metso, managing five projects and focusing on building QA processes and automation frameworks with limited QA resources.

Highlights:

Design patterns give test automation teams a shared vocabulary, so a problem can be solved by naming a pattern (Builder, Singleton, Facade) rather than re-explaining the solution from scratch.

Spaghetti test code is the direct result of skipping encapsulation: without patterns like Page Object, selectors and methods scatter across tests and duplication multiplies.

The YAGNI principle applies to test automation frameworks: implement only what is needed now, and leave extensibility as a structural option, not a pile of unused helpers.

AI tools will generate overcomplicated test automation code without explicit constraints in the prompt, and a human engineer must still verify and redesign the output.

The Gang of Four design patterns, published in 1994, remain directly applicable to test automation, including creational patterns and the Pool Object pattern for managing parallel web driver instances.