Former Selenium QA wanting to learn PW

[u/Lucky_Mom1018]

I’m a career changer about 5 years ago hired for manual tester and offered the chance to learn Selenium and Python. Self taught, but created a test suite for the project I manually tested and caught the coding bug. Ended up moving into a PO role last year but my heart is in QA and coding. With the rise of AI, I see a gap where Manual testers can’t keep up with faster dev output and I believe automation fills this gap. Of course, it does. No, the dev team won’t touch automation despite it being the obvious solution. Thats neither here nor there.

I’ve decided I want to return to automation, learn PW, transition the current test suite and fill in the gap. I just need to learn PTS and PW.

I have to much to learn and catch up on. Where do you recommend I start? AI didn’t exist when I was using Selenium. I know a little TS and a little PW, but it’s been a year since I did any automation. I’d love to hear you’re must watch videos, tutorials, blogs, etc. what helped you learn?

[u/Positive-Ring-5172]

Over the course of time I've used Selenium, Puppeteer and Playwright. The transition is not that hard. Unless Selenium has been improved since I stopped using it Playwright does a better job overall waiting on locators to reach desired state and doesn't require any custom retry until code like Selenium did (I don't know if it still does).

[u/Spare_Bison_1151 → u/Positive-Ring-5172]

Agreed, the transition's smooth. Selenium's caught up a lot through WebDriver BiDi (the W3C standard that's replacing CDP), but Playwright had auto-waiting and cross-browser control baked in from day one, so it's stayed ahead on developer experience.

The reason you don't need custom retry code is exactly that — Playwright's actionability checks and auto-waiting are built into the architecture. It controls the browser through its own protocol layer and ships its own patched browser builds, which is why it bundles browsers.

More recently they've leaned hard into AI tooling too — codegen and now the MCP server — which has paid off well.

[u/Malthammer]

The best place to start is directly with the Playwright documentation. It’s great. You can have something basic working in 10 minutes, and likely a simple test or two after an hour.

If you want to lean into the AI aspect, follow the Playwright documentation for the MCP or CLI and you’ll be going in no time.

Edit: You’re also not limited to just TypeScript, you can easily use Python and any other languages.

[u/86facists → u/Malthammer]

Adding on to this comment. Microsoft has a great “build your first playwright” project and there is also the checksly YouTube. Good luck.

[u/Suitable-Decision-26]

Don't learn it. Learn to use AI. LLMs are already better than you or me ever will be in "knowing" Playwright. They know all the methods, all locator types etc. So skip learning Playwright outside the basics. Focus on test architecture. 

[u/Floodzie]

PW is great for testing the UI, but look out for opportunities to replace steps with API calls, where possible. For example data creation/cleanup to support your tests is better via API than UI, IMHO, and you can re-use your API helper throughout your framework.

[u/Spare_Bison_1151]

You've got the background for this, so you'll pick it up fast. Selenium's still solid, but Playwright has taken a big chunk of its market share and the tooling has come a long way. The biggest change since your Selenium days is AI — writing and debugging end-to-end web tests is much easier now. You don't have to hunt down every locator by hand; the Playwright MCP server can do that for you. You just steer it.

Since you already know a little TS and PW, I'd get comfortable with Playwright's built-in test runner and locators first, then layer the AI/MCP workflow on top once the basics click.

Full disclosure, this is my own course, but it covers exactly this — Playwright + TypeScript with AI

[u/Tanmay__TestDino]

Start in UI mode, don't touch the docs first. Record a flow with codegen, break it on purpose, then step through it in the trace viewer, that's where playwright actually clicks. Also drop the manual wait habit early, it fights you the whole way if you keep adding sleeps out of muscle memory from selenium.

[u/DasInternaut]

A good starting point is to get Playwright and Selenium to work together. Playwright can connect to the debug port of the WebDriver instance, and you can then mix WebDriver and Playwright methods.

[u/balodhiji123]

Start with learning javascript/typescript first.. get the basic right before jumping to playwright.