How to Avoid Flaky Tests in Playwright

Flaky tests in Playwright, often seen in UI and end-to-end (E2E) testing, are tests that yield inconsistent results, passing or failing unpredictably, thus posing significant challenges to Continuous Integration (CI) systems. Such tests can arise due to race conditions, slowdowns, or bugs in test scripts, and they lead to random pipeline failures, necessitating repeated test runs that slow down deployments. To mitigate test flakiness, Playwright recommends best practices such as using locators over static selectors, avoiding hard waits, setting appropriate timeouts, and leveraging automatic retries. Additionally, debugging tools like Playwright's Trace Viewer help analyze test failures by providing detailed insights into test executions. While eliminating flaky tests entirely is impractical, these strategies can significantly reduce their occurrence, ensuring more reliable and efficient CI processes.