New · Automation Track

Playwright Deep-Dive — the definitive guide

Playwright is already the automation tool throughout this bootcamp. This track goes deeper.

From the first playwright.config.ts to production-grade CI pipelines with sharding, retries, and trace artefacts — this track covers the patterns that separate a passing test suite from one that actually ships with confidence. Every lesson is grounded in real Playwright usage on NZ projects.

Start with Lesson 1 → Back to Specialised

This track covers

playwright.config.ts Fixtures & Hooks Network Interception Component Testing CI Pipelines Trace Viewer

NZ context

Patterns drawn from real NZ SDET work — government portals, fintech platforms, and SaaS products. The examples use the tools and CI platforms NZ teams actually run: GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, and standard Node environments.

Who this is for

Mid-level to senior SDETs who already know Playwright basics and want to master advanced patterns. Also useful for teams standardising on Playwright and wanting a shared reference for config, fixtures, and CI design.

The 4 lessons

From config to production pipeline

Lesson 1

Playwright Fundamentals

Project setup, playwright.config.ts in depth, page object model, and the selector strategies that stay stable when the DOM changes.

~30 min read · ~70 min with exercises · Playwright

Lesson 2

Advanced Playwright — Network & Auth

Network interception, request mocking, browser contexts for multi-user flows, and storage state for authentication without repeating login steps.

~30 min read · ~75 min with exercises · Playwright

Lesson 3

Component Testing with Playwright

Playwright’s component testing mode for React, Vue, and Svelte. When to use component tests instead of full E2E, and how to structure them for speed.

~25 min read · ~65 min with exercises · Playwright

Lesson 4

Playwright CI & Pipelines

GitHub Actions sharding, parallelisation, retry strategy, trace artefact upload, and the Playwright HTML reporter. Building a pipeline that tells you what failed and why.

~30 min read · ~70 min with exercises · Playwright

Why this track

Most Playwright suites underperform because the config is wrong

Playwright is the most capable browser automation tool available. Most teams use 20% of it. They write tests that pass locally and flake in CI. They hard-code auth tokens. They run 400 tests serially when they could shard across 8 workers. They have no trace artefacts, so when a test fails at 2am in a deploy pipeline, nobody can tell what actually happened.

The gap is not the test code — it is the surrounding architecture. The config, the fixtures, the CI design, the retry and reporting strategy. Get those right and a Playwright suite becomes a reliable signal. Get them wrong and it becomes noise that teams learn to ignore.

This track teaches the architecture, not just the syntax. By the end you will be able to set up a Playwright project that a team can actually maintain, run it efficiently in CI, and trust the results it produces.

Other specialised tracks

Specialised