Tools, Tips and Thoughts for Playwright, Selenium UI and API automated testing
Most of the time when you want to check an element is visible in Playwright you do so as part of a test assertion. For example if you’re testing that attempting to log in using an invalid password displays an error message, your test might look something like this: This is absolutely fine because checking […]
Sometimes you create a Playwright test but can’t seem to actually run it in Visual Studio Code. Here are the most common reasons why, and how to fix it. Incorrect File Name Playwright uses certain conventions to identify test files. Depending on the language you’re using, ensure that your test files end with: Playwright Test […]
Are you getting an error when trying to execute commands in the Visual Studio Code terminal window, with the error message containing the text “{executable file} is not digitally signed”? For example when running “yarn dev” I get this error message: Here’s the actual screenshot: One way to fix this is to run this code […]
Sometimes when you’re writing a test you’ll find you want to run the same test multiple times, but with different data. For example let’s say you need tests for a UK e-commerce website to verify that the correct sales tax (VAT) is applied to purchases. Most products in the UK incur VAT of 20% but […]
Many test automation frameworks like Playwright support the use of a data-testid attribute (or similar) as a method for locating elements on a web page. For example we can locate this element: and populate it with some text using this Playwright code: Although data-testid is the most common name for this attribute – which is […]
Test automation engineers frequently inspect web elements using the browser Dev Tools (F12) window “Elements” tab to discover the ID or other attributes needed to locate them in their test scripts. However many modern frameworks like React can make this difficult because the elements can disappear when the mouse moves into the Dev Tools window […]
Playwright has become the test automation framework of choice for many software development teams for good reason. In this article we’ll look at the main advantages – and disadvantages – of using Playwright in the real world. Advantages of Playwright 1) Automatic Waits One of the biggest problems with test automation is flaky tests, and […]
Introduction There are times when it’s super-useful to be able to quickly create your own RESTful API, whether it’s for learning test automation or for front-end developers needing a mock back-end. You could code your own API but it’s a time-consuming and tricky process. Alternatively public APIs are available but suffer from significant drawbacks: you […]
It’s crucial to know when to use Cucumber and BDD to test APIs, and when NOT to. It’s a controversial topic and many have strong views on this, so in this article we’re going to take a good look – using real world examples – of when to use BDD, Cucumber, feature files and Gherkin to […]
Sharing data between step definition methods within the same class is pretty straightforward in SpecFlow – you can simply create and use a class variable – but how do we share data between steps in different classes? In the past this was done using Scenario Context and Feature Context, however these are now outdated (and […]