Andrew Knight
The Automation Panda
About
Andrew Knight is the "Automation Panda" - a software engineering leader who builds solutions for software testing problems. Over the past decade, he has designed and built robust test automation projects from the ground up that can run thousands of tests continuously. He is the author of the upcoming book "The Way To Test Software" from Manning Publications, and he is also the lead developer for Boa Constrictor, the .NET Screenplay Pattern. Andy currently works full-time as the Lead Software Engineer in Test for PrecisionLender at Q2. Read his tech blog at AutomationPanda.com, and follow him on Twitter at @AutomationPanda.
Awesome Web Testing with Playwright and AI
Description
Everybody gets frustrated when web apps are broken, but testing them thoroughly doesn't need to be a chore. Playwright together with AI makes testing web apps fun! Playwright offers a slew of nifty features like automatic waiting, mobile emulation, and network interception. Plus, with isolated browser contexts, Playwright tests can set up much faster than traditional Web UI tests.
In this tutorial, we will automate concise yet robust web app tests for "BuggyBoard", a bug tracking web app with Playwright in TypeScript. And we will expedite our test development with the superpowers of AI. Specifically, we will cover:
- How to add Playwright to a project
- How to explore an app with AI assistance and Playwright's MCP
- How to generate Playwright test code
- How to context engineer scalable automation patterns
- How Playwright compares to other browser automation tools like Selenium and Cypress
By the end of this session, you'll be empowered to test modern web apps with modern web test tools. You'll also have an example project to be the foundation for your future tests.
This year, I am revamping my Playwright content to include AI assisted coding techniques, like using context engineering, agentic analysis, and Playwright's MCP servers.