Testing asynchronous events and rich web applications is difficult to automate, particularly because the application’s state just after a particular event might not exist for long or ever again. However, the introduction of playwright automated testing has come as a boon for all the testers. With the rise of single-page applications, asynchronous control flow, and rich client-side code that handles a lot of things using callbacks or promises, asynchronous tests are more important than ever.
Microsoft Playwright provides both a Python client for writing tests and an HTTP server for executing them. An Ops team created playwright Node.js after finding that Playwright did not play well with other frameworks in the Node.js ecosystem. The current version of Playwright.js supports jsdom, which interacts with Chrome’s V8 JavaScript environment. In order to get the most out of this library, you will need to know how to create automated tests, how to set up your project for test-driven development and understand its overall structure.
Introduction to Playwright Automated Testing
Microsoft is constantly improving the building tools, debugging and analyzing tools, etc. Included in this are the libraries and frameworks. With the growing performance and capability of cloud computing, using APIs to package code can help teams accelerate development. Even playwright automated testing, the testers can easily understand where the problem lies. The interactive console for Playwright is more interactive. The actual functionality of the library is almost exactly the same as Puppeteer’s, but the execution model and browser compatibility are what really make the difference.
- As a powerful tool that can automate browsers in automated testing environments, developers will be more efficient when developing complex web applications. While many code libraries are designed to allow you to create custom browser-based tests and check your websites, Playwright is different.
- Rather than providing an API with a bevy of pre-defined functions, Playwright gives you a set of JavaScript modules that are then combined in a way that best suits your needs. This approach gives you the flexibility and power of node-style programming without sacrificing the simplicity you need when creating automated custom browser tests.
- It is based on Node.js, which makes it easily runnable in servers or embedded into mobile or desktop applications that need to access large amounts of data in certain hours of the day, for example. If you are someone who’s bothered by inconsistencies in coding between browsers, then Playwright might be the library you’ve been looking for.
- Playwright can use headless Chrome, full-page Chrome, or Safari. The different browser selection process involves calling a page object method on the Page class and passing a callback for success/failure. That method ultimately passes you to the driver manager where you can select the desired browser and attach to it.
Furthermore, it can be used by any developer to help create sites and applications for every platform. Playwright is an open-source project released by Microsoft Garage. It aims to automate the browser and make it easier to tie together scripts written in various programming languages such as JavaScript and TypeScript, as well as frameworks like React, Angular and Vue.
Features of Playwright Automated Testing
Playwright is a JavaScript-based open-source framework code which offers a library of rich user integration testing controls for web applications. It gives testers the ability to simulate user interactions with the application being tested and to validate that the application is behaving correctly and as expected. It can be convenient for those who don’t want to learn code or have time to write the automation scripts. Making testing procedures simple makes it possible for a whole team or even an entire organization to use automated testing, which results in increasingly higher quality of your software.
- Working with cross-browser frameworks
Playwright is cross-platform and runs in any modern browser, and can be used to test web applications written in any major programming language. It will even run on multiple browsers, simultaneously. Playwright helps build a wide range of applications, including complex web and mobile applications. It is possible to build applications in both synchronous and asynchronous ways. It’s perfectly integrated with a lot of mainstream languages and can be used in almost any project. It’s one more great development in the field of paradigm and usability, making developing faster and easier than ever before.
- Assertions and test scripts
With Playwright, you can easily create or edit scripts that you want to perform. You can use existing templates provided by Microsoft for various web page controls or, if necessary, you can use JavaScript to code your own template, which is particularly helpful if you are testing a particular web application, and you don’t want to use the existing templates from Microsoft. While you’re developing an application with full-fledged IDE capabilities, you don’t need anything beyond Playwright. You can use it to transform an HTML input control into a calendar control or checkbox, type text into a textbox or image uploader and much more.
- Modern Features and less restrictions
The Playwright is an easy to use, highly customizable automation testing tool that delivers powerful and flexible screenshot comparisons, which help you to catch visual regressions quickly and efficiently. Playwright supports the popular BDD frameworks and lets you use your preferred test language. It provides intuitive, informative and meaningful reports in an easy-to-read format. Playwright also supports numerous assertion libraries and can test against live servers. It lets you simulate a user interacting with your browser through your site—clicking on links, typing in forms, and generally traversing the page just as a real user would.
- Communicating with a single socket
Playwright is an automated collaborative software testing tool. It allows test cases to be written as plain text and then, rather than executing the tests sequentially, Playwright coordinates multiple instances of a test on many machines at once, with the aim of executing tests in parallel. It provides a solution for end-to-end testing of web applications, including automatically spinning up virtual browsers, filling them with the appropriate content and validating that it displays as expected. Playwright is SaaS, allowing companies to connect without having to load any software locally onto existing workstations.
Playwright offers a simple, yet powerful API that provides you with the flexibility to use the testing framework of your choice to perform end-to-end JavaScript testing. If you prefer to leverage your existing knowledge of a particular test framework over our own, no problem! Playwright uses an adapter called WebDriverIO that emulates the APIs of popular JavaScript frameworks such as Jasmine and Mocha. This allows you to use the API you already know while taking advantage of the abilities in Playwright’s platform.
Mistakes or Disadvantages involved in Playwright Automated Testing
Playwright provides many advantages over other frameworks as a framework for writing automated tests. For example, taking advantage of Playwright’s built-in test recorder saves time and effort, and the fact that you can run tests from any web browser enables faster development. This type of convenience makes it much easier to handle multiple tasks simultaneously and saves you time. However, with the advantages, there are some disadvantages or the mistakes that have been coming up in the playwright automated testing.
- Maintenance of the Automation Tool
Playwright Automated testing is the best way to ensure your current application build performs up to your expectations and that you continue to meet changing business requirements. But this does not necessarily mean that by automating all your tests you have automated all testing activities, or even achieved test automation in general. In the early stages of automation, a playwright requires clear definition of scope/features/components that need to be automated as well as the time period for which this script needs to be maintained.
Furthermore, playwright is an automated testing tool that comes up with its own tests. In essence, the tool first compiles and analyzes the script and then selects its own test sequences based on analyzing the application code. But this does not necessarily mean that by automating all your tests you have automated all testing activities, or even achieved test automation in general.
- Less Test Validations
Data validation is essential to ensure data integrity in the playwright automated testing. It helps in making your application robust and secure against errors that may be caused during the runtime. Data validation thus aids in building a healthy application ecosystem. The problem with unit testing is that it only validates data using interfaces, i.e., the user-facing components of an application. While this is useful for manual testing and to some extent of system validation from a functional perspective, it does not validate the integrity of data at a lower level.
The application may be storing all the correct information in its database but this data may easily be lost or rendered unusable when such issues as truncation, nulls and so on are not validated at the lower database level where this kind of validation should be implemented first – before any logic is carried out on them.
- Not looking up at Precision and Speed
Employing Playwright automated testing to ensure the stability of your application is a boost to your entire organization. Playwright automated tests help eliminate errors in your application that impact customer experience, cost you time and money, and harm your reputation. You can reduce test failure by 60 percent. You no longer need to waste time with repetitive or tedious tests through automation. Instead, you can conduct tests against regression-prone areas of the application more frequently and with fewer resources. This saves you money in terms of both time and money. However, the mistake that occurs in the Playwright automated testing is that many testers don’t consider the Precision and Speed in their checklist. They should also work alongside key stakeholders to create an implementation plan to establish which use cases get automated first and how you’ll measure ROI.
- Keeping CI/CD Pipeline aside
Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is a software development practice that aims for a fast, repeatable, and reliable delivery process. It was developed as an alternative to the trends of longer development cycles and more manual, error-prone methods of testing software before release. CI/CD ensures that all code committed to version control repositories can be built, tested and released consistently and repeatedly. Even in playwright automated testing, the testers generally ignore CI/CD, which is a major mistake at the end of the process. In this, the broader software development process covered by DevOps spans from the moment a developer checks out source code from a version control system, to the moment an end user receives a software product. It includes automated testing, building, deployment and operation tasks.
Playwright Testing With LambdaTest
LambdaTest’s Test Orchestration and Execution Platform enables you to run browser test and ensure their compatibility with a variety of mobile devices and browsers. The platform integrates with popular CI/CD tools such as Jira, Jenkins, TeamCity, Travis CI, etc., and integrates with Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, Puppeteer and more testing frameworks. It also offers built-in debugging tools that enable testers to quickly identify and resolve bugs.
Final Thoughts
Playwright is a behavior-driven development and acceptance test-management tool that can help test teams leverage automated acceptance tests for agile software development. Through the use of acceptance test-driven development, Playwright can create a common understanding of the application functionality. Manual tests are slow and brittle. Automated tests are faster to run but can produce a lot of noise around what the real issue might be. With Playwright, these two types of testing can be synthesized so that end users can focus on core issues instead of window dressing.
Playwright is built to overcome some of the limitations found in other tools by combining manual and automated testing into a unified test suite. Playwright can also export your test cases to various code repositories and automatically run them in parallel so that you can get faster results. Playwright automated testing automates the process of testing applications. It’s built by QA and developers, for QA and developers. The solution is comprehensive and has both written documentation and a video series to help everyone in your organization get on board.
