Correcting Wrong 'Playwright's Advantage over Selenium" Part 8: "Playwright UI Mode, CodeGen, VSCode plugin, Trace viewer"

Real Test Automation Engineers achieve much better (quality and proficiency) with Selenium WebDriver.

Continue to correct the 8th wrong claim in this YouTube video, “Playwright vs Selenium: What Advantages Make Playwright the Winner in Automation Testing Battle 🏆”.

This article series:

• “Playwright is Modern and Faster than Selenium” 😒

• “Playwright has Parallel Execution Support” 👎🏽

• “Playwright has Native Auto-Waiting Mechanism” 👎🏽

• “Playwright has a native test runner” 👎🏽

• “Playwright has native HTML Reporters” 👎🏽

• “Playwright Features Can be Configured in one Configuration” 👎🏽

• “Playwright supports a range of Testing Types, e.g. API Testing, Component Testing, …” 👎🏽

• “Playwright UI Mode, CodeGen, Debugging support.” 👎🏽

• “Playwright ARIA locator support” 👎🏽

• “Playwright has frequent releases” 👎🏽

• Wrap Up

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Claim 8: “Playwright UI Mode, CodeGen, VSCode plugin, Trace viewer and more”

The video (see above link) did not provide a heading for this claim, but it is included in the chapters.

Here are taken from the video:

• “codegen, which is going to generate the whole code for you …; ”

• “VSCode plugin … perform a lot of native debugging of the code features … which selenium does not offer”

This claim, which is wrong again, touches multiple points.

1. CodeGen in VS Code

Please note: VS Code plugin falls into the tools category. So, below I will include tools for Selenium.

I went straight to the source, Playwright's official documentation on Code Gen. I watched the CodeGen demo video and read the guide.

It primarily showcases a recording feature using a basic Todo List app, a technique similar to what has been used in various commercial testing tools like QTP, which is generally regarded as a bad approach.

For more, check out my other articles:

• Record/Playback in Test Automation is Bad, mostly.

• Story: “What is the Most Challenging in E2E Test Automation?”

Some might argue, “Playwright CodeGen is different; it does not playback, and it also generates the skeleton”.

The main point of the quote from the classic Agile Testing book is a significant concern about the quality of recorded test scripts. In other words, hand-craft E2E test scripting is much better (& cheaper). On this topic, check out the below articles:

• Test Creation Only Accounts for ~10% of Web Test Automation Efforts

• Why I Created a Selenium Recorder But Rarely Use it myself?

If about generating a test skeleton, TestWise users would laugh because they could have done that since 2007, 17 years ago.

Have a read my daughter’s article:

Set up and Develop Selenium WebDriver RSpec Test Scripts with TestWise IDE

The video below uses an Appium + WinAppDriver script to: