Exploring Playwright and MCP

Hey, do you want to learn all about the latest and greatest with Playwright and mcp? If so, you're in for a treat because we have Debbie o' Brien joining us. She's a massive expert in this area. She's the principal technical program manager at Microsoft, which is part of the developer division team advocating for Playwright end to end testing. You've probably seen her all over the place. She talks at all the things about Playwright. She gives a lot of talks on testing. She's building the playwright community. I think she's running the Ambassadors program and a bunch of other stuff. Really excited to have her on the show. You don't want to miss it. Check it out. Hey, Debbie, welcome to the Guild.

Hi. I just want to say I love that intro music. I felt like I was like Irishy kind of, you know. It's very cool.

Well, it's awesome to finally have you on the show, I guess. I haven't talked to someone from playwright since 2020. 2020. About. Almost five years ago. A little over five years. It's grown a lot. I know you have some new announcements, but before we get into it, I'm always curious. When I look at your resume on LinkedIn, you've been like a hardcore front end developer, it seems for a while. How did you get into Playwright and automation?

That's a good question. I have such a long history, it would take the whole podcast. So I'll do a really quick thing. But I basically started web design 1997 back in the day and web design was rubbish. So I ended up leaving because the Internet was boring. And then like I started flash websites and WordPress websites and then like things changed and you know, the iPhone came about and all my websites were thrown in the bin because Flash didn't work anymore on anything. Signed up restudying and I studied PHP and then I studied like, you know, Adobe Photoshop again and, and the web again because 1997, unlike, you know, 10 years later, the web is like a different web. So I was trying to get a job and it was really hard to get a job because they kept wanting all these like stuff that I had no idea what it's about. I knew how to HTML and I knew how to CSS and that wasn't good enough because back then a front end developer only did HTML and CSS. They didn't do JavaScript. That was given to someone else, a programmer, they call that. Right. We were like the front end developer and then a programmer programmed the JavaScript. So I then I had to learn JavaScript basically. And that was really difficult for me. It was only six years ago. Nobody would hire me six years ago because I did not have JavaScript. Even though my CSS skills were through the roof, that did not count. Nobody cared about that. So I did end up getting a job. After studying for about nine months, I went into studying full time. A front end tech degree and a full stack tech degree. Which part? Testing was part of the course, but it was like a very much ended at the end. Like, you know, this is something to do. It wasn't like a big part, but it's still a good enough part. And then I got a job in a company and I felt like, and I don't mean to be bad in any way, but I felt like they were doing things not as performant as they should have, as they could be doing things. So they were doing a lot of manual things. And I was like, we could just run a script from that. I learned how to do that using Node. Just run the script and then it'll add the CSS file automatically for you. They weren't using components. We started adding components. They weren't testing. So we started to introduce testing. And the funny thing was, and I know I'm going off course here and I'll come back, but the funny thing was that nobody wanted us to introduce testing because there was a bug fixing department and they were just worried about losing their jobs because if we do testing there's going to be no bugs to fix, therefore these people are not going to have jobs. And that's the mental framing of like, don't fix something that's working because we are employed by this. Anyway, we introduced testing and we had to do a lot of like work and convincing. But that was in one company. And then I changed jobs and went on to work in other companies. And testing was a very big part of like something that was. I was keen to bring in playwright resin around back then I was using Selenium and Cypress. And testing was something like if they could cut it out of the like because it was an agency, right? So if you've got like so many hours of work to do and this is all everything you're going to do for them, testing was the thing they would eliminate to cut costs. And it was like, no. So we ended up trying to like not put testing in, as in don't tell them we're going to test, but test. And we had to do it that way because. Because otherwise companies did not want to pay for testing. So testing was Something I was always kind of doing. But, like, I was very passionate in the front end area. So I was working a lot with front end static websites at the time and convincing everyone that we all need static websites and nobody believed me. And they said, that's ridiculous. Why would you want to do that? I feel like I'm always pushing for things. I'm always pushing people in the direction that they don't want to go in. People don't like change. So that was hard. It was great fun. I got then hired by the Nuxt team and I worked directly for nuxt. That was amazing. It was absolutely fantastic. And then I ended up working for Bit, which is completely diving into the deep end because I was like the very much Vue Nuxt developer. And then I was thrown into React Typescript and I had to, like, learn all this in a second. I was like, oh, my God. Like, I. Like, I did touch React, like some years ago, but that was different. React and React had changed. Everything's different. So, yeah, and then we did a lot of testing there as well. We were testing components and making sure that every Bit component was tested. So that was more testing in there. So testing has always been part of my journey. And then the job just came up and someone said to me, you should apply for this. And I was like, but I don't even know what Playwright is. There's no way I could, you know. And I never ever considered myself as someone advocating for testing because I was just more like, making sure your front end website, everything is perfect. Like, I was like, make sure everything is perfect. And testing is part of that perfection. Right? Not just, you know. So that. Yeah, that was three years ago. Three years and a month ago. Which is crazy. It's like gone so fast. But I absolutely love what I do. It's great. Everyone is like, no, we don't have time to test. No, it costs too much. No, we're not testing. And I'm starting to see that more people are testing, which is great. There's still pushback. There will always be pushback, but I think with Playwright and making testing easier and fun, that's been my thing since I started making testing easier and fun. And I think testing is so much easier and fun, but there's still people out there not testing.

Love it. Love it. So, you know, you mentioned a lot. The first one was you were using Cypress and selenium and then you learned about Playwright. Now, I'm not putting down other tools, but what do you think separates Playwright from other frameworks? Maybe, or who's the perfect Persona that you talk to that like, oh, this team really would benefit from Playwright because of X, Y and Z. I think when we were.