From Clicks to Code: Automating Anything with Playwright
AgileVerify
Every repetitive browser task starts the same way: click, type, wait, repeat. Logging into dashboards. Testing checkout flows. Downloading reports. Filling forms. Most teams still do some of this manually, even when it happens every sprint. That’s where Playwright changes the game. Built by Microsoft, Playwright is a modern browser automation framework that lets you control Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit using code. What you do with a mouse, it does with precision and speed.
Official docs: https://playwright.dev/
Turning Manual Work into Automation
Imagine a QA engineer validating a login and dashboard flow before every release. Instead of repeating the same steps, a Playwright script:
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Opens the browser
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Enters credentials
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Navigates to the dashboard
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Verifies critical elements
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Fails if something breaks
Now connect that to Jenkins. Every code push triggers the test automatically. No waiting for manual verification. No missed edge cases. That’s not just automation, it’s continuous quality.
Real-Life Use Cases
1. Regression Testing
A SaaS team reduced regression time drastically by automating core user journeys with Playwright. Tests ran headless in CI, caught UI breaks early, and generated trace reports for debugging.
2. Automated Report Downloads
A finance team needed daily CSV exports from a web portal without APIs. A Playwright script logged in, applied filters, downloaded reports, and saved them to a shared folder, fully automated.
3. Accessibility Checks
Teams often combine Playwright with axe-core to automatically detect accessibility violations during UI testing.
Why Not Just Use Selenium?
Tools like Selenium have been around for years. But Playwright was built for modern web apps. It auto-waits for elements, supports multiple browser engines natively, and provides powerful debugging tools like trace viewers. In short, it removes much of the flakiness teams struggle with.
A Simple Example
Here’s what automating a login looks like in JavaScript:
import { test, expect } from ‘@playwright/test’;
test(‘Login test’, async ({ page }) => {
await page.goto(‘https://example.com/login’);
await page.fill(‘#username’, ‘user1’);
await page.fill(‘#password’, ‘password123’);
await page.click(‘button[type=submit]’);
await expect(page).toHaveURL(‘/dashboard’);
});
That’s it. Clicks become code.
Beyond Testing: Automating Anything
Playwright isn’t limited to QA.
Developers use it to:
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Seed test environments
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Capture screenshots for marketing
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Generate PDFs of dynamic pages
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Validate SEO metadata
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Test accessibility
For accessibility validation, teams often combine Playwright with tools like axe-core to catch WCAG issues automatically. Product teams use it for synthetic monitoring, simulating user journeys every few minutes to ensure uptime. Support teams use it to reproduce customer issues reliably. When you control the browser, the browser becomes programmable infrastructure.
Integration with CI/CD
Automation is powerful. Automated automation is transformative.
Playwright integrates smoothly with CI pipelines such as Jenkins. Teams can run headless tests, generate HTML reports, store artifacts, capture videos on failure, and parallelize across environments.
For QA-driven organizations looking to accelerate this journey, our Cortex – Automation Accelerator helps standardize and scale browser automation adoption. Cortex provides reusable components, structured automation frameworks, and proven QA best practices so teams don’t start from scratch every time.
You can explore Cortex here: https://agileverify.com/services/automation-accelerator-cortex/
Common Pitfalls (And How to Avoid Them)
New users often:
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Overuse static waits
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Write brittle selectors
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Ignore parallel execution issues
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Automate unstable environments
The fix is discipline. Use role-based selectors where possible. Leverage Playwright’s locator strategy. Keep environments predictable. Review automation code like production code. Automation scripts are software. Treat them accordingly.
The Bigger Shift!
When you automate browser tasks, you’re not just saving time, you’re building repeatability into your system. QA teams move faster. Releases become safer. Human effort shifts from repetition to improvement. If a task lives in a browser and you do it more than once, it can probably be automated. And once you start thinking in code instead of clicks, you’ll begin seeing automation opportunities everywhere.
