Hey folks, back with another article - this time about how to design tests that survive when the UI is refactored.
TLDR: Learn why UI refactors keep breaking Playwright tests even when the features work fine.
It covers the coupling patterns that make suites fragile and ranks selectors by what actually survives design system changes. There's also content on structuring page objects so migrations don't cascade into dozens of test failures.
TLDR: Wrote about why Playwright's HTML reporter stops working once your suite grows past ~100 tests.
The reporter is fine for debugging failures in a single run. But it treats every run as a clean slate. No history, no cross-run comparison, no way to tell if a test has been flaky for months or just broke today. You end up not knowing whether the suite is getting better or worse. Failures all look the same whether they're fresh regressions or known offenders you've been ignoring.
In our experience, the pain hits earlier than people expect. Somewhere around 50-100 tests, not 200+. By 300 tests you've probably already built something custom or just accepted that CI is chaos 🙃