This page covers intention and approach to implement e2e automation framework in your ongoing project
Let's end Cypress vs Playwright , it will be obvious outcome once your requirements are clear
My Motivation for Implementing E2E Testing
As a web developer, my goal is to deliver changes to production as quickly as possible to evaluate their impact on end users. However, ensuring quality is crucial—I don’t want to release buggy updates. While I do write unit tests, their effectiveness often depends on tight feature deadlines, and they are limited to testing individual modules.
Currently, we rely on the QA team to manually perform end-to-end (E2E) and smoke testing in lower environments like UAT. However, when there’s a strict deadline for high-priority features, I often need to wait for QA resources to become available. This delays feedback and makes the process less efficient.
To address this, I discussed the situation with senior team members and began working on a proof of concept (POC) for implementing automated E2E test cases.
Key Considerations:
- Budget and cost implications of the automation framework and CI/CD runners.
- Maintaining the speed and efficiency of the CI/CD pipeline.
- Most importantly, ensuring that the QA team supports writing and maintaining test cases in the future.
This approach aims to reduce dependency on manual testing, speed up feedback loops, and improve overall productivity.
Breaking Down My Approach
Research on Popular Frameworks and Their Costs
I focused on identifying frameworks that meet the following criteria:
- Strong Community Support: To ensure availability of resources, troubleshooting help, and ongoing updates. Built-in Browser Support: Should include major browsers out of the box.
- Reliability: Minimal flakiness to make the CI/CD pipeline more dependable. Support for Parallel Execution: To speed up testing and enable faster rollouts.
- Debugging Features: Provides videos, screenshots, and analytical reports for quick debugging of failed or flaky E2E test cases. Third-Party Integration: Easily extendable to third-party providers for comprehensive testing on various devices, operating systems, and reporting capabilities.
Performing a Proof of Concept (POC)
Based on the research, I shortlisted two frameworks: Cypress and Playwright. Other frameworks fell short due to their limitations:
Puppeteer: Lacks extensive built-in browser support, is less reliable, and has weaker community support compared to Cypress and Playwright. It also lacks native support for parallel execution.
Selenium: Although robust, it has a steeper learning curve and requires significant effort for initial setup and parallel execution, making it less efficient compared to the alternatives.
POC Outcomes
The analytical results of the POC highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the shortlisted frameworks and guide the decision for the most suitable E2E testing solution.
Summary
Based on the analysis above, there are significantly more negative outcomes (indicated by reds) with Cypress compared to Playwright. As a result, I chose Playwright as our E2E testing framework, tailored to meet our specific requirements.
One standout feature of Playwright is its native E2E code generation tool, which is a game-changer. This makes it incredibly easy for our QA team to generate E2E tests and integrate them into the production pipeline with minimal modifications. This reduces the learning curve for the QA team and fosters better collaboration between QA and developers—a true win-win situation.
While our QA team continues to play a vital role, adopting Playwright has significantly improved the reliability of our tests and the speed of rollouts in the production pipeline.
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