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IndiaQ1. How does Playwright differ from Selenium?
Short answer: Modern architecture with auto-waiting, multi-browser, and built-in tooling.
Strong answer: Playwright drives browsers via the DevTools/CDP-style protocol with auto-waiting for elements to be actionable, reducing flakiness. It supports Chromium, Firefox and WebKit, offers powerful selectors, network interception, parallelism, tracing, and built-in test runner/fixtures out of the box — a more modern, batteries-included alternative to Selenium.
Likely follow-up: How does auto-waiting reduce flakiness?
What the interviewer is checking: Modern E2E awareness.
Common mistake: Manually adding waits Playwright already handles.
Q2. What is auto-waiting and actionability in Playwright?
Short answer: Playwright waits for elements to be visible, stable and enabled before acting.
Strong answer: Before clicking/typing, Playwright automatically waits for the element to be attached, visible, stable (not animating), enabled and to receive events — so you rarely need explicit waits. This "actionability" model removes most timing flakiness that plagues older tools.
Likely follow-up: What actionability checks run before a click?
What the interviewer is checking: Core Playwright concept.
Common mistake: Adding manual sleeps that fight auto-waiting.
Q3. What are Playwright fixtures and why use them?
Short answer: Built-in test fixtures provide isolated context/page and reusable setup.
Strong answer: Playwright Test fixtures (page, context, browser, and custom ones) provide isolated, per-test setup/teardown — each test gets a fresh browser context, avoiding shared state. Custom fixtures encapsulate reusable setup (auth, data), keeping tests clean and parallel-safe. This isolation is key to reliable, parallel runs.
Likely follow-up: Why does each test getting a fresh context help?
What the interviewer is checking: Framework understanding.
Common mistake: Sharing state across tests and causing interference.
Q4. How does Playwright handle network interception and mocking?
Short answer: route() intercepts requests to mock, modify or block responses.
Strong answer: page.route() intercepts network requests so you can mock API responses, modify payloads, block resources, or simulate errors and slow networks — enabling fast, deterministic tests independent of backends and testing of edge cases. Great for isolating the frontend under test.
Likely follow-up: Why mock APIs in E2E tests sometimes?
What the interviewer is checking: Advanced testing capability.
Common mistake: Depending on live backends for every UI test, causing flakiness.
Q5. How do you debug failing Playwright tests?
Short answer: Use trace viewer, screenshots, videos, and headed/debug mode.
Strong answer: Playwright records traces (DOM snapshots, network, console) you open in the Trace Viewer to see exactly what happened, plus screenshots and videos on failure. Run headed or with the inspector (PWDEBUG) to step through. This rich tooling makes diagnosing failures far faster than log-only debugging.
Likely follow-up: What does the Trace Viewer show you?
What the interviewer is checking: Debugging proficiency.
Common mistake: Debugging with print statements when tracing is built in.
Q6. How do you structure and scale a Playwright test suite?
Short answer: Use projects for browsers, POM for structure, and built-in parallelism.
Strong answer: Use Playwright projects to run across browsers/devices, organize with the Page Object Model or component helpers, share setup via fixtures, and rely on built-in parallel workers for speed. Integrate with CI, use test tags/sharding for large suites, and keep tests independent. It scales without extra grid infrastructure.
Likely follow-up: How does Playwright parallelize without a separate grid?
What the interviewer is checking: Scaling modern E2E.
Common mistake: Writing serial, interdependent tests that can’t parallelize.