[ON-WEEK][POC] Playwright

[MadameSheema]

Motivation

Cypress is not performing well lately.

• We have been facing significant performance issues with Cypress. For instance, it takes a long time to open the visual interface and start executing tests.

Teams are finding it increasingly challenging to write new tests and debug existing ones.

• The time and effort required to create new tests or troubleshoot existing ones have become burdensome.

Concern about the impact this could have on our testing practices.

• Lose motivation to write tests or, worse, skip writing crucial tests.

Why Playwright?

• Compared to Cypress, Playwright seems to be known for its faster execution times and lower resource consumption. What could have a positive impact by having faster feedback during development and execution of new tests as well as more efficient use of CI resources.

• Provides powerful debugging tools which can make easier to write, debug and execute tests.

• Seems to provide the same capabilities we currently use in our Cypress tests.

• Given Playwright's active development and backing by Microsoft, it is likely to continue evolving rapidly, making it a safe long-term choice.

Considering all the above, Playwright seems to be a strong candidate to replace Cypress and address all the issues we are facing lately regarding UI test automation.

Objective of this POC

To write in Playwright a couple of tests we currently have on Cypress to check the performance of the tool as well as the development experience.

The tests selected have been:

• enable_risk_score_redirect.cy.ts

  • Owned by Entity Analytics team and selected by its simplicity since it does not need any special setup to be executed and is short.

• manual_rule_run.cy.ts

  • Owned by Detection Engine team and selected because is short and adds a bit more of complexity due to it needs of clean-up and setting up initial data through the API.

How to execute the tests

Visual mode

• Navigate to: x-pack/test/security_solution_playwright
• Execute: yarn open:ess for ESS environment or yarn open:serverless for serverless environment.

Headless mode

• Navigate to: x-pack/test/security_solution_playwright
• Execute: yarn run:ess for ESS environment or yarn run:serverless for serverless environment.

From VScode

• Install Playwright Test for VScode extension by Microsoft
• Navigate to: x-pack/test/security_solution_playwright
• Execute: yarn open:ess for ESS environment or yarn open:serverless for serverless environment.
• Open your IDE
• Click on the Testing icon
• On the Test Explorer click on the three dots to select the profile you are going to execute ess or serverless
• Click on the test you want to execute or navigate to the spec file of the test and execute it from the same spec.

My experience

• Tests are way easier to implement than with Cypress.
• Playwright does not rely on chainable commands. Chainable commands on Cypress can lead to confusing code.
• Without chainable commands, the flow of the tests is more explicit and easier to understand.
• You can notice that the tool has been designed with Typescript in mind.
• Is super easy to implement the Page Object Model pattern (POM).
• With POM the test code is clean and focused on "what" rather than "how".
• Love the fact that you can execute the tests from the same IDE without having to switch windows during test development.
• The visual mode execution gives you lots of information out of the box.

The scope of this PR

• Sets the initial infrastructure to write and execute tests with Playwright.
• Has examples and set a basis about how to write tests using the POM.
• Allows the execution of the tests in ESS and serverless (just stateless environment).
• Integrates the execution of the tests with buildkite.

Pending to be done/investigate

• Proper readme
• How to split tests and PO between the different teams
• Good reports on CI
• Upload screenshots on CI
• Flaky test suite runner
• Complete the labeling
• Execution of the tests on MKI environments

FAQ

Can I start adding tests to playwright? Currently, you can explore and experiment with Playwright, but there is still work pending to be done to make the tool officially usable.

Why security engineering productivity is the owner of the playwright folder? This is something temporary to make sure that good practices are followed.