Preface

This book is your hands-on guide to mastering Playwright, Microsoft’s modern automation framework for end-to-end testing. Throughout these chapters, we’ll walk through everything from getting started with Playwright’s core features, such as browser automation, selectors, and locators, to building robust test suites with fixtures, page objects, and test data management. You’ll learn how to run tests in parallel, integrate them into CI/CD pipelines, use Playwright Test for reporting and debugging, and even scale your tests for complex web applications.

When I first started working with automated testing, I remember how it felt like juggling too many things at once: browser versions, test runners, CI pipelines, and that mysterious “timeout error” that always showed up right before a release. Automation promised speed and confidence, but too often it delivered frustration and endless debugging sessions. I wanted to change that.

Then I discovered Playwright, and it felt like someone finally read every tester’s wish list and decided to build the tool we’d all been waiting for. Fast, reliable, cross-browser testing that actually works across modern web apps? But even with such a powerful tool, there’s still a learning curve: how to use it effectively, how to structure tests, and how to keep them fast, readable, and maintainable.

While digging deeper into the Playwright ecosystem, I came across Butch Mayhew’s blog, which was full of insightful, practical advice that immediately resonated with me. Butch, a Playwright Ambassador, has a real gift for making testing feel approachable and for breaking down complex concepts into clear explanations. One conversation led to another, and before long, we decided to join forces to write this book.

This book is the result of that collaboration: our shared experience, our lessons learned (sometimes the hard way), and our excitement about what Playwright makes possible. It’s packed with hands-on examples, real-world scenarios, and actionable guidance to help you build fast, reliable, and scalable tests for modern web applications.

Whether you’re a developer dipping your toes into test automation, a QA engineer looking to upgrade your toolkit, or a tech lead aiming to bring stability and confidence to your releases, we wrote this book with you in mind.