Ditching Selenium for Playwright + Pytest: What We Gained (and Why We Never Looked Back)

Описание и применение

Перевод Selenium на Playwright + Pytest сократил время регрессии, уменьшил флаки и ускорил отладку, благодаря авто‑ожиданию, параллельному запуску и трассировке.

Задача

Flaky failures, slow CI pipelines, and painful debugging plagued a Selenium‑based E2E suite for a data‑heavy enterprise web app.

Результат

Switching to Playwright reduced regression time by 42%, flaky failures by 71%, and debugging effort by 75%.

Рабочий процесс

• 1. Replace Selenium with Playwright + pytest via pytest‑playwright plugin.
• 2. Remove hard‑coded Thread.sleep calls; rely on Playwright auto‑waits.
• 3. Configure pytest‑xdist for parallel runs (-n auto).
• 4. Enable tracing, video, screenshot on failure in pytest.ini.
• 5. Structure framework with Page Object Model, components, data factories, utils.
• 6. Write tests that use page objects and expect assertions.
• 7. Run tests locally with --headed --slowmo for debugging, view trace with playwright show-trace.

Доказательства

Regression time went from ~6 hours to ~3.5, and the flaky rate went from ~35% to ~10%.

Источник

Playwright controls browsers through a protocol connection ... It sees what the browser is doing and checks that an element is attached, visible, stable, enabled, and able to receive events before it acts.

Источник

With pytest‑xdist, tests run concurrently, and full regression time dropped from ~6 hours to ~3.5 hours.

Источник