Workshop: Advanced Web Testing with Playwright and AI
summary
A build-along that actually shows the workflow: Playwright + local CLI skills (not MCP) set up from scratch, Chromium-only config, and a live run against the Buggy Board app in Cursor that produces plan, generate, heal test plans from specs, then generates 13 login tests implemented with page objects and fixtures, runs them locally, and wires CI advice (parallel workers, caching, atomic tests). Details include CLI skill files, seed auth spec, and when to review AI healing.
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chapters (35)
- 0:00Workshop Opens - Advanced Web Testing With Playwright and AI
- 2:08Speaker Intro - Andrew Knight, Senior Director of Product & Engineering at Cycle Labs
- 5:43What Playwright Is and Why the Debug Protocol Makes It Fast
- 6:44Browser Projects vs Big-Box Browsers, and Why That Matters
- 7:45Built-In Goodies: Auto-Waiting, Codegen, UI Mode, API Testing
- 8:46Playwright Is Natively AI Supportive - MCP, Agents and a CLI
- 13:23Selenium vs Cypress vs Playwright, Fairly Compared
- 16:25The AI Stack Defined: Coding Agent, Model, Rules, Sub-Agents, Skills
- 19:37MCP vs CLI - and When to Choose Each
- 22:11The Three-Step AI Testing Process: Plan, Generate, Heal
- 24:12A Warning on Healing: Review Failures Before You Let AI "Fix" Them
- 26:45From Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering
- 29:19Spec-Driven Development: If You Can Describe It, You Can Do It
- 33:58Turning Best Practices Into Rules: Page Objects, Fixtures, Test IDs
- 37:36The Kingpin Rule: Generate Tests Whenever You Generate Product Code
- 40:07Three-Way Programming: Developer, Tester and AI
- 42:10The Test Automation System: CI Is the Production System for Automation
- 44:46The Five-Step Playbook for Scaling a Test Suite
- 46:50Live Demo Begins: The Buggy Board App in Cursor
- 51:30Asking AI to Explain an Unfamiliar Codebase
- 53:33Inside the Specs Folder: The Project Constitution
- 57:35Installing Playwright Into the Project From Scratch
- 1:00:40Configuring Chromium-Only - Manually or by Prompt
- 1:03:14Installing the Playwright CLI and Skills
- 1:06:53Invoking the Playwright CLI Skill Directly
- 1:07:24Prompting for Test Plans From Specs Plus Live App Exploration
- 1:11:37Q&A: Prioritising Tests From Recent Code Changes
- 1:12:08Q&A: Is the Generated Test Checking Business Behaviour or Just the UI?
- 1:14:45Reviewing the Generated Test Plans Per Feature
- 1:15:47Where AI Finds Negative Cases Humans Skip
- 1:16:18Generating the Login Tests From the Plan
- 1:19:01Q&A: Where AI Genuinely Improves Playwright Beyond Boilerplate
- 1:21:37Q&A: Determinism for Enterprise CI/CD - and Humans Aren't Deterministic Either
- 1:23:39The Result: 13 Login Tests With Page Objects and Fixtures
- 1:26:11Q&A: Biggest Challenges at Scale; Migrating From WebdriverIO
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