#playwright_software

[carolchung-eng]

Playwright Testing (Initial Thoughts)

These are my initial thoughts of the Playwright automated testing tool (end-to-end) - generally positive. I have admittedly only skimmed the surface of its capabilities as it was included in the boilerplate on a template I've been using (epic stack by Kent C. Dodds - todo add link to repo). Here is a summary of this post:

What is Playwright?

What does it replace or compare to?

What does Playwright do well?

What are weaknesses of Playwright?

Playwright is a tool for automated end-to-end web application testing. It was developed by Microsoft and initially released in 2020. Playwright is comparable to earlier testing tools like Cypress or Selenium. In my experience, using the Python client for Selenium was pretty complicated because the documentation was not very clear and I felt like I had to set up tests in a trial-and-error manner. I have not used Cypress personally and so cannot speak to how they compare but have read that Cypress can take some time to set up.

These are some highlights or features that make Playwright a stand-out tool:

Provides CodeGen functionality or a UI recording feature which converts user actions to code necessary to create a test

Flexible definition of HTML element locators

Support for testing in a headless browser (results in better testing performance)

Support for running tests in parallel

Cross browser testing support (chromium, firefox, webkit)

Support for running tests in UI mode (provides an interface and access to review events for debugging faulty tests)

Right now I don't have any complaints about using Playwright but have not delved deeply into writing complex tests with it. I used it mainly through a boilerplate template, which made it easy to try out with little overhead and then captured another test using CodeGen.