E2E Testing Playwright Cypress
Use When
- Regression risk on critical flows
- UI and API integration must be verified together
Workflow
- Select critical journeys and data fixtures
- Implement stable selectors and test IDs
- Run tests in CI on every merge
- Quarantine flaky tests with owners
- Integrate visual or accessibility checks where needed
Required Checks
- Critical journeys covered in CI
- Flaky test rate tracked and reduced
- Test data isolated per run
- Failures include actionable diagnostics
Decision Framework
- Prefer explicit contracts and compatibility rules before implementation.
- If dependency risk is high, require timeout, retry, and fallback strategy per call path.
- If async messaging is used, require idempotency, replay, and dead-letter handling.
- If traffic patterns are volatile, require load, failover, and scaling validation before ship.
Common Rationalizations And Rebuttals
- "Retries will handle failures automatically." -> Unbounded retries can amplify outages; use budgets.
- "We can skip runbooks for now." -> Operational ambiguity delays incident recovery.
- "Contract changes are minor." -> Small breaking changes cause broad downstream regressions.
Evidence Pack
- Contract compatibility note and migration strategy (if applicable)
- Failure-mode test evidence for dependency degradation and recovery
- Observability snapshot (latency, error, saturation, or queue health)
- Rollout and rollback steps with clear trigger thresholds
Exit Criteria
- Workflow is production-ready with verified evidence
- Operational and security guardrails are in place
- Release and rollback expectations are documented
