Testing playwright

Playwright

E2E tests cover critical user journeys end-to-end (signup, checkout, the money paths) — not every permutation. Component-level behavior belongs in Storybook/Vitest.

Locators — user-facing only

• Priority (same list as testing-vitest): getByRole(…, { name }) > getByLabel > getByText > getByTestId (last resort). Reaching for getByPlaceholder is a smell — the input probably lacks a label (see a11y); fix the markup instead.
• Never CSS/XPath selectors tied to DOM structure or generated class names (.css-x91kb) — they encode implementation, not behavior.
• Scope with locator.filter() / chaining instead of nth() indexes when possible.

Web-first assertions — the anti-flake core

• await expect(locator).toBeVisible() / toHaveText() / toHaveCount() — these auto-retry until timeout. Use them for ALL state checks.
• Banned: page.waitForTimeout(), expect(await locator.isVisible()) (no retry), manual polling loops. A hard wait is always a hidden race.
• Wait for meaning, not mechanics: assert the UI state you need next, rather than waitForLoadState('networkidle').

Isolation & auth

• Every test independent: own data, no ordering, parallel-safe. A test must pass alone via --repeat-each=2 and with the full suite sharded.
• Auth once per worker via a setup project + storageState, not a UI login in every test. Test the login flow itself in exactly one spec.
• storageState files contain live session tokens: keep them in playwright/.auth/ and gitignore that directory; authenticate only dedicated, ephemeral test accounts — never real users or production credentials.
• Create test data via API/seed scripts in fixtures, not by clicking through the UI; clean up in the fixture teardown.

Fixtures over Page Objects

• Encode app-specific setup as custom fixtures (test.extend) — authenticated page, seeded user, feature flags.
• Keep page helpers lightweight: functions/classes wrapping actions (checkout.fillShipping(data)), not assertion museums. Assertions live in tests.

Network

• True E2E (against real backend) for the few critical paths; page.route() stubbing for hard-to-trigger states (server errors, empty lists, slow responses).
• Never stub the thing the test exists to verify.

Config

• webServer block to build+serve the app — tests own their server lifecycle, locally and in CI.
• CI: retries: 2, trace: 'on-first-retry', forbidOnly: true, sharding for speed. Local: 0 retries so flake is loud.
• A retried-pass is a flake report, not a success — fix the cause (usually a missing web-first assertion before an action).
• toHaveScreenshot assertions follow the visual-regression skill (own project, fixture data, determinism rules) — they don't belong in functional E2E specs.
• Cover the browsers users use (chromium minimum; add webkit/firefox per project requirements) — but don't 3x the matrix for stubbed-network tests.

A11y gate

• @axe-core/playwright scan on each key page/state in a dedicated spec; fail on serious/critical violations.