u/MasterWitcher69

we're having the inevitable conversation:

Cypress is flaky

Playwright is faster

let's rewrite everything

and I keep asking a boring question nobody seems excited to answer:

what exactly are we trying to improve?

because our current failures are roughly:

● selectors tied to implementation details

● shared test data

● random third-party/API delays

● huge setup flows before every test

● tests nobody knows why we still run

● CI workers getting murdered by parallel jobs

Playwright may absolutely improve parts of this.

auto-waiting is better in a lot of cases. multi-tab/multi-context flows are cleaner. browser support

is strong. parallelism model is nice.

but moving:

cy.get('.checkout-button-v4')

to:

page.locator('.checkout-button-v4')

did not modernize anything lol. before rewriting I'd want actual numbers:

flaky failures by root cause

not “Cypress feels flaky”

median/p95 suite time

CI cost

time spent debugging failed runs

locator churn per release

tests requiring capabilities Cypress genuinely handles poorly for us

how many tests are still valuable

that last one is probably the uncomfortable metric.

I suspect if we audited 1,500 tests properly we'd delete 400 before migrating anything.

I've also been thinking about whether framework migration is even the right lever for locator maintenance.

KaneAI/TestMu is interesting here because you can keep the test closer to business intent, use

Reviewable self-healing when UI mappings change, then export/keep code in the underlying

Automation framework where needed.

Not “framework doesn't matter anymore”.

It obviously does.

More like: maybe we shouldn't rewrite a mature suite solely because maintaining selectors sucks.

and self-healing still needs boundaries.

if:

“Continue” moved from one container to another, fine.

if:

“Approve payment” disappeared and the healer found “Cancel payment” nearby...

Please turn the build red and ruin my morning.

I'm not anti-Playwright at all. I'm anti spending six months rewriting a bad test architecture into a newer bad test architecture

Without measuring whether anything actually got better.

People who actually migrated Cypress → Playwright:

What metric improved enough that you can say the rewrite was worth it?