A Quick Playwright Overview for QA Managers

Playwright is an automation testing tool that has been gaining a lot of traction in the QA community. Despite being the latest tool compared to Selenium and Cypress, Playwright has become a popular choice today. Being a QA manager, you might be in the position to choose an automation tool for your testing needs or might be considering migrating to a different technology to better suit your needs. During such a scenario, you’ll have a lot of questions in your mind that you will be searching for answers to. In this Playwright overview blog, we’re going to answer all those questions as our prospective clients ask similar questions during introductory or discovery calls for our test automation services.

Common Playwright Questions

Before we head over to the answers, let’s first list out all the commonly asked questions that we will be addressing.

• What is the difference between Cypress and Playwright?
• What programming language can I choose for Playwright?
• Advantages of Playwright?
• Can we automate Mobile Applications using Playwright?
• What reports can I get from PlayWright?
• Is it open-source or commercial?
• Who is maintaining Playwright?
• Can I convert Cypress scripts to Playwright?
• Can I run Playwright from CI\CD tools?

If an automation tester is fond of a particular tool, they will likely promote it to their colleagues and acquaintances. Nonetheless, we must evaluate the pros and cons before suggesting an automation testing tool. Let us examine each question’s solutions individually in our Playwright overview blog.

1. What is the difference between Cypress and Playwright?

Cypress is a web application automation testing tool and it differs from Selenium in one fundamental aspect. Selenium sends a command to a browser via JSON wire protocol and calls the browser API to perform an action on the application. However, in Cypress, your test code can access all the application’s objects like your product code since it runs the tests inside of the browser.

Advantages of running tests inside the browser:

• You can alter web traffic on the fly
• You can modify everything coming in & out of the browser
• Faster execution
• No need to add additional wait commands
• Enable advanced debugging facilities

Now let’s take a look at Playwright. It is also a framework to automate web applications and it achieves all the features of Cypress without using in-process test runner. Currently, Playwright is a popular choice among testers due to its quick test execution and compatibility with all modern browsers. It also supports multiple languages such as JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, C#, and Java for writing the tests. On the other hand, Cypress only supports JavaScript as its scripting language.

2. What programming language can I choose for Playwright?

You can select the appropriate scripting language according to your team’s familiarity and proficiency. The core features and implementations of Playwright are consistent across all supported languages.

To assess the release information for each language, simply refer to the corresponding GitHub repository for that language’s implementation.

• JavaScript/TypeScript
• Python
• Java
• C#

3. Advantages of Playwright?

Although we are viewing the advantages throughout the Playwright overview blog, we have listed the key aspects for you to get a quick understanding.

• Playwright is a reliable & e2e automation testing framework for modern web apps
• It works with Chromium, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, & WebKit
• Works on any platform
• You can execute the tests in full isolation
• Test Execution is super fast
• Supports Headless and Headful modes
• Playwright is much faster than Cypress, Selenium, WebDriverIO, & Puppeteer tools
• 500+ contributors around the world manage the Playwright codebase
• You can automate API tests as well

4. Can we automate Mobile Applications using Playwright?

Another major criterion while choosing the right automation tool for you is its capability to automate different types of applications. Especially the web and mobile applications combination is something that many are on the lookout for. Here is the overview of Playwright’s mobile application testing capabilities.

• You cannot automate Native mobile apps
• You can automate mobile web on Android emulators or real devices using ADB commands. However, it is still in the experimental stage
• There is no official confirmation of iOS support yet

5. What reports can I get from Playwright?

Reporting is the next part we’ll be covering in our Playwright overview as it is a crucial aspect when deciding the right test automation tool for you. Here is the list of reporting options available in Playwright.

• List Reporter – This is the default reporter of Playwright. It prints a line for each test being run
• Line Reporter – It reports the last executed test and prints error details if there is a failure. Line reporter is useful to monitor the execution progress instead of viewing the entire test results.
• Dot Reporter – It is a concise report that shows only a single character for each test execution.
• HTML Reporter – It generates reports as a webpage
• Blob Reporter – Use blob reporter when you run tests in parallel.
• JSON Reporter – Generates report as JSON file
• Junit Reporter -JUnit reporter produces a JUnit-style XML report.

6. Is Playwright open-source or commercial?

Playwright is an open-source tool.

7. Who is maintaining Playwright?

Microsoft released the first version of Playwright on Feb 1, 2020. As of writing this blog, 127 versions have been released and 500+ contributors around the world manage the Playwright codebase. That is a very good stat that can give you a lot of confidence in choosing Playwright.

8. Can I convert Cypress scripts to Playwright?

For those who have already used Cypress for your test automation and are in the thought of migrating, our Playwright overview blog also offers possible options to move to Playwright. There are multiple tools/plugins in the market to convert Cypress scripts to Playwright, and here’s the list.

• cy2pw – This experimental node package has the capability to transform standard Cypress structures into Playwright.
• cypress-to-playwright – It is a conversion tool that can parse the entire script directory of Cypress to Playwright structure. You can find the supported snippets by viewing the linked page.
• ChatGPT – You can also try ChatGPT to convert your scripts.

9. Can I run Playwright from CI\CD tools?

Ensuring that your changes do not disrupt the production code is a vital requirement when it comes to test automation. The great news is that you can run your Playwright tests on a Continuous Integration tool for every commit and pull request. It even supports all major CI tools – Github Actions, Azure Pipelines, CircleCI, Jenkins, Bitbucket Pipelines, Gitlab CI, & Google Cloud Build.

Playwright Overview

One of the standout benefits of using Playwright is its speed. With parallel execution capabilities, multiple tests can run simultaneously on different browsers, saving valuable time in the testing process. This not only increases efficiency but also allows for more thorough testing coverage. Although we have discussed all the key factors a QA manager should consider in our Playwright overview blog, one must always see how well the tool will fit their testing needs and make the final call. We hope you are now in a better position to make that decision.