45. Playwright Testing and Codegen

45. End-to-End Testing with Playwright and the use of codegen - with Debbie O'Brien

In this episode, we talk to Debbie O'Brien, a senior program manager at Microsoft. Where she is in charge of advocating Playwright End-to-End Testing. Debbie has over 10 years of experience in front-end development. We dive straight into why Playwright is becoming increasingly popular. A lot of developers don’t like to write tests; they think it’s boring, takes too much time, or is hard to learn. Debbie explains that one of Playwright’s features is codegen, which generates the tests for you and helps you write better code. What problems do Playwright and codegen solve? And what’s coming in the near future? Moreover, we elaborate on what Playwright exactly is; its best features and benefits, what it does differently, and how easily it integrates. For example, it works in VS Code, you literally only have to press the green triangle to run it. Ultimately, the goal is to make testing a lot easier for people so that we have more people testing. We discuss how the testing world is shifting and how Debbie thinks that we’re moving more towards an end-to-end world rather than unit testing. Because your code changes. You're constantly modifying it. And what this means for the testing community and a company’s testing culture. Furthermore, we talk about the work Debbie’s team has done, and is doing to further advance Playwright. So, if you haven’t tried Playwright yet, give it a try, you won't regret it.

About this episode, and Debbie O'Brien in particular: you can find Debbie on X @debs_obrien & GitHub. And don't forget to check out her website where you can find all her blogs and videos with all her courses.

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