End-to-end (E2E) testing is a crucial step in ensuring that web applications function as expected across different scenarios, devices, and browsers. However, maintaining efficient and reliable tests can be challenging. This is where Playwright shines — offering a powerful and developer-friendly framework for robust E2E automation.
A sound application architecture doesnt resist to changes, but welcomes them. Yet it still doesnt guarantee that the code is unbroken after we implement new features, making fixes or refactoring. Here we run automated tests to ensure that the app integrity didnt suffer. So we write unit-tests to check if separate objects, methods, functions work property independently. With integration tests we ensure they play as designed together. Eventually we create system tests to find out if the entire system meets our business requirements. The last one is also known as E2E testing and covers different aspects such functionality, GUI/Usability, security performance. As for functional testing I have already published a few articles sharing my experience with such tools as Nightmare and Zombie.js. They both provide nice programming experience, but still have their drawbacks. Then I asked myself what could serve me better? What I need is an execution environment accessible from both command-line interface and in a browser. Thus I can run the tests during CI (e.g. by Jenkins), but still use interactive mode while debugging the tests. Besides I prefer to have access to the latest features emerging with evergreen browsers. That makes me think of Headless Chrome. Does it have a Node.js API? It turned out it does. The library is called Puppeteer and its truly amazing. Below we are going to examine it by writing a test suite for an RWD demo app with a form.