playwright-best-practices

Playwright locator strategies prioritize roles, labels, placeholders, and visible text over brittle CSS selectors to reduce test flakiness. Using resilient locators ensures tests remain maintainable and less prone to breaking during UI updates.

Reuse authentication state in Playwright by saving and loading storage state instead of performing UI-based login in every test. This approach speeds up test execution and improves reliability through proper test isolation.

Avoid page.waitForTimeout in Playwright because it introduces fixed delays causing brittle test patterns. Use web-first assertions instead to automatically wait for expected element states, improving test reliability and execution speed.

Configure Playwright with minimal reporters in CI to prevent context overflow. Streamlining reporting output avoids memory issues during continuous integration runs while maintaining essential test feedback for automated pipelines.

Use fixtures over beforeEach for Playwright test setup to achieve better test isolation and reliable execution. Fixtures provide scoped setup and teardown, enabling flexible test composition without polluting global test context.

This Playwright best practices guidance applies to TypeScript Playwright tests using @playwright/test in CI and local development. It covers locator strategies, assertions, fixtures, authentication flows, and configuration for TypeScript environments.