Do you do automated UI testing?

Automated UI testing is a valuable component of a test strategy, to check interacting with the software in a similar way to end users.

Benefits

As part of an overall test strategy that blends human testing with automation, automating at the UI level can be helpful to check that key user workflows keep working as we expect.

Lower level automated tests (e.g. unit tests) are small in scope and are unlikely to catch problems with more sophisticated usage patterns of the software. Higher level tests via the user interface are much larger in scope and have the potential to mitigate the risk of important user workflows becoming broken in production.

Tooling

There are numerous tools available for facilitating automated UI testing through the browser:

• Playwright (✅ recommended)
• Selenium (was the gold standard)
• Several others: Telerik Test Studio, Cypress, or Puppeteer, to name a few.

Playwright

Playwright allows you to write tests in many popular languages including .NET, Java, Python and JavaScript/TypeScript.

Playwright has a few advantages over Selenium:

• Actionability
• Performance
• Stability
• Switching browser contexts for parallel testing
• and more...

//Store the ID of the original window
const originalWindow = await driver.getWindowHandle();

//Check we don't have other windows open already
assert((await driver.getAllWindowHandles()).length === 1);

//Click the link which opens in a new window
await driver.findElement(By.linkText('new window')).click();

//Wait for the new window or tab
await driver.wait(
    async () => (await driver.getAllWindowHandles()).length === 2,
    10000
  );

//Loop through until we find a new window handle
const windows = await driver.getAllWindowHandles();
windows.forEach(async handle => {
  if (handle !== originalWindow) {
    await driver.switchTo().window(handle);
  }
});

//Wait for the new tab to finish loading content
await driver.wait(until.titleIs('Selenium documentation'), 10000);

❌ Figure: Bad example - Selenium only lets you have one window focused at a time meaning you can't do parallel testing easily

const { chromium } = require('playwright');

// Create a Chromium browser instance
const browser = await chromium.launch();

// Create two isolated browser contexts
const userContext = await browser.newContext();
const adminContext = await browser.newContext();

// Create pages and interact with contexts independently

✅ Figure: Good example - Playwright makes it easy to spin up independent browser contexts for parallel testing

Playwright codegen

Playwright offers a cool feature that lets developers record actions in the browser to automatically generate the code for tests.

Note: While this feature is useful for learning the syntax and structure of Playwright tests, it should not be used to generate production-quality test code.

Example of using Playwright

Watch Matt Goldman and Andreas Lengkeek from SSW demonstrate the use of Playwright to create a simple UI test in this YouTube video:

Caution

Automated UI testing is powerful, but it should still be done with planning.

Modern tools like Playwright and AI Agents have reduced the maintenance pain by helping teams write, debug, and fix tests.

However, UI tests are still slower to run because they interact with the browser and test broader user workflows.

Use them for important workflows.

See Do you remember to use automated UI testing sparingly?