Most teams adopting Selenium for the first time make the same mistakes. Here's what I see over and over after years of building test automation for production systems:

1. Hardcoded waits everywhere. Thread.sleep(5000) is not a testing strategy. Use explicit waits with expected conditions. Your suite will run 3-4x faster and stop randomly failing.

2. No Page Object Model. If your locators are scattered across test methods, you'll rewrite half your suite every time the UI changes. POM isn't optional — it's the foundation.

3. Testing through the UI when you shouldn't be. Not everything needs a browser. API tests are faster, cheaper, and more reliable for backend validation. Save Selenium for what actually needs a browser.

4. Ignoring test data management. Tests that depend on specific database state are brittle. Build factories, use setup/teardown properly, and isolate your test data.

5. No CI/CD integration. If your tests don't run automatically on every push, they're decoration. Integrate with your pipeline from day one.

These are exactly the problems I built TestForge to solve — production-ready frameworks that handle all of this out of the box so your team can focus on writing tests, not infrastructure.