Automated Visual Regression Testing with Playwright offers a solution to guard against visual regressions while refactoring stylesheets and introducing new features.
Playwright's built-in visual comparison feature helps in comparing visual artifacts efficiently without relying on external packages.
The setup involves creating a dedicated directory for visual testing, setting up dependencies, defining test environments, and configuring browsers.
Snapshot testing with Playwright involves taking screenshots to establish baselines for comparison and identifying any visual changes.
Automated generation of tests for every page using a web crawler and dynamically generating tests based on identified URLs simplifies the testing process.
Exceptions in visual testing, like flakiness or randomness, can be handled by injecting custom CSS using Playwright.
Adjusting viewport size for capturing full page screenshots and waiting for network idle state improves test accuracy but may increase resource usage.
Despite the initial simplicity expected, implementing visual regression testing with Playwright requires careful setup and considerations like layout shifts and timeouts.
The article discusses the author's journey to setting up automated visual regression testing with Playwright and reflects on the challenges and solutions discovered.
The process involved leveraging Playwright's capabilities, configuring test environments, generating tests dynamically, handling exceptions, and optimizing page capture for accurate testing results.