Playwright Testing& Development

The tool is the easy part. What determines whether a suite survives is architecture, and we make four commitments early. A selector contract agreed with the developers, usually data-testid so ordinary UI refactoring does not cascade into red builds. Test data created and destroyed through the API, so every spec is independent and execution order carries no meaning. Page objects that model user-facing behaviour rather than mirroring DOM structure. And CI integration from the first week, because a suite that only runs on a laptop is documentation, not a gate.

On top of that: storage-state authentication so login is not re-run hundreds of times, fixtures that scope setup to what each test actually needs, sharded execution across CI runners, and reporting that names a likely cause instead of attaching a screenshot. Our long-form guidance on the architecture is in Building a Playwright Framework Your Team Won't Abandon.

Two engagements come up repeatedly. The first is migration from Selenium or Cypress, which we run side by side: the highest-value journeys move first, both suites gate releases during the transition, and the old suite is retired only once parity is proven. Coverage never dips as the price of modernising.

The second is rescue, a Playwright suite that has grown flaky and lost the team's trust. That work starts with trace-based diagnosis rather than rewriting: most instability traces to a handful of root causes, typically shared test data, implicit ordering assumptions, animation and network races, or selectors bound to styling. We fix the causes and re-establish the gate. The background reading is Flaky Test Cases in Automation Testing.