Debugging Playwright Tests

Writing and executing tests can be a seamless and enjoyable process, depending on the technology stack for testing or the application being tested. However, it can be a painful experience if you are not well-equipped with tools for debugging failing tests. This is often due to error messages not providing enough information about the issue, and the browser hanging at specific points in the test script. Rerunning and pausing the test to debug a specific step can be time-consuming.

Let’s examine a common error in test automation: “Test timeout exceeded.” If we know that this test was executed successfully in the past and is now failing with a timeout error, we can assume that there was an error with executing one action inside the test because the element was not found. The error message indicates that the error occurred at action locator.fill and the line of code is 19.

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There are several tools that we can use to debug tests:

• Headed mode execution
• Verbose API logs
• Browser Developer Tools
• Playwright Inspector
• VS Code extension
• Trace Viewer