For the past few weeks, this calendar has been a hub for sharing valuable insights, and today, I'm thrilled to contribute an article drawn directly from experience. In this article, I’m going to share with you my experience on transitioning from using Cypress to Playwright.
Background
Shifting careers can often reshape the way we see technology and in my case, it definitely did. Although I am a licensed electronics engineer, I chose to pursue a career in the IT field. I started as a developer, but eventually discovered that my strengths and interests aligned more with quality assurance. That journey gave me the opportunity to work with two of today’s most popular automation tools: Cypress and Playwright.
My exposure to these tools came naturally through experience. In my first job as a QA, Cypress was our primary automation framework. Cypress felt like home, and I built numerous robust test suites with it. Later on, when I joined Likha-iT, the team was already utilizing Playwright, giving me a solid basis to compare the two from real-world usage.
Cypress vs. Playwright
As I dived deeper into Playwright, a few features truly stood out and made me appreciate the shift:
1. Speed and Parallelization: Playwright often feels incredibly fast. Its architecture allows for true parallel execution of tests, not just across different files but even within a single file if configured correctly. For Likha's growing suite of complex applications, I've been amazed at how quickly large test suites complete compared to what I was used to.
2. Auto-Waiting and Assertions: Both Cypress and Playwright handle waiting for elements, but Playwright's auto-waiting mechanism feels incredibly robust. It automatically waits for elements to be actionable before performing operations, reducing the need for explicit cy.wait() commands that sometimes plague Cypress tests.
3. Tracing and Debugging: In terms of debugging, both Cypress and Playwright are fantastic because they can capture a snapshot of the timeline of events. When a test fails, we can investigate and pinpoint what happened, as well as inspect the state of the page. This capability has significantly cut down debugging time, which is very helpful for issues that are hard to reproduce.
Conclusion
Every transition brings challenges, but my journey from a comfortable Cypress user to using Playwright at Likha has been incredibly rewarding. While I still appreciate Cypress for its strengths, especially for purely JavaScript-based projects with less focus on broad cross-browser compatibility, I am now leaning towards Playwright as my preferred tool for modern, large-scale web application testing. This shift serves as a powerful reminder that stepping out of one’s comfort zone often leads to more effective and exciting ways to build confidence in the software we deliver.
The article "「感想戦」で終わらせない振り返りへ。品質指標を持つQAがプロジェクト振り返りを主導する価値" written by nun , QA engineer of freee人事労務 will be published tomorrow.
Let’s keep good quality~
