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Automate a Storefront with Playwright MCP

Divya Manohar
Co-Founder and CEO, DevAssure

TL;DR

Point an LLM at a public storefront through Playwright MCP. Drive six flows. Put a checkable assertion in every prompt. Convert one flow into a Playwright spec and run it without the agent. MCP is excellent at exploration and a poor substitute for a regression suite — the agent is the hands, not the judgement.

The target is demo.evershop.io/kids, a public EverShop demo store. Fourteen products, a price filter, a colour facet, a sort control, add-to-cart, a cart page, and a checkout. Enough surface area to hit every interesting case.

By the end you will have driven six flows through an LLM, measured what they cost, and converted one of them into a Playwright spec that runs without an agent.

Playwright Grid on GitHub Actions

Divya Manohar
Co-Founder and CEO, DevAssure

Every team that gets serious about end-to-end testing eventually builds the same thing: a pipeline that takes a pull request, spins up browsers somewhere, runs the suite, and reports back. In 2026 the default stack for this is Playwright on GitHub Actions - no Selenium Grid hub/node topology to babysit, because Playwright's own worker model plus CI-level sharding is the grid.

This guide builds that setup end to end:

Local project to CI workflow, sharded parallel execution, self-hosted runners, then scheduled regression jobs

Then we do the part most tutorials skip: what happens at 1,000+ tests, what the infrastructure actually costs in dollars and engineer-hours, and why flakiness is an environment problem before it's a test problem.

Flutter Web E2E When the DOM Is Canvas

Santhosh Selladurai
Co-Founder and CTO, DevAssure

Short answer

Flutter web often paints the UI on a canvas, so Selenium and Playwright cannot see buttons or inputs in the DOM. DevAssure O2 unlocks the Flutter DOM via the accessibility tree and uses visual reasoning on the canvas when the DOM is not exposed — enabling scriptless automation where traditional tools fail.

Flutter is popular for building cross-platform applications from a single codebase. The same Dart code can target Android, iOS, desktop, and the web. But when it comes to end-to-end testing Flutter web apps, teams often hit a frustrating problem:

"Why can't Selenium or Playwright see my buttons, text fields, dropdowns, and labels?"

The short answer: many Flutter web apps render the UI into a canvas instead of exposing normal HTML elements. That changes how testing needs to be approached.

This post explains how Flutter web works internally, why the DOM is often not useful for automation, and practical options for testing — including how the DevAssure O2 agent unlocks the Flutter DOM for element-level automation and applies visual reasoning over the canvas when selectors are unavailable. If you are new to canvas automation, start with our guides on canvas test automation and Flutter web automation without image-based hacks.

Why developers should stop writing Playwright tests

Santhosh Selladurai
Co-Founder and CTO, DevAssure

Playwright is one of the best browser automation frameworks ever built. It is fast, reliable, developer-friendly, and powerful. If your team knows exactly what to test, how the UI is structured, which locators are stable, and who will maintain the tests forever, Playwright is an excellent choice.

But that is also the problem.

Most product teams do not struggle because Playwright is weak. They struggle because writing and maintaining browser tests is still manual engineering work:

  • Every test needs scripts.
  • Every script needs locators.
  • Every locator can break.
  • Every UI change needs test maintenance.
  • Every failure needs someone to investigate whether the app is broken or the test is broken.

At some point, the test suite becomes another codebase to maintain.

Agent-based testing changes this model. Instead of writing scripts that tell the browser exactly what to click, type, and assert, you give the agent an objective. The agent understands the application, interacts with the UI, adapts to changes, validates behavior, and reports issues.

That is why developers should start moving away from writing Playwright tests manually.

Playwright MCP: Future of Test Automation?

Divya Manohar
Co-Founder and CEO, DevAssure

Automation Is Changing—FastDirect link to Automation Is Changing—Fast

For the last decade, browser automation has mostly meant:

write selectors → write assertions → maintain scripts forever

Playwright evolved this model with fast execution, cross-browser support, auto-wait, trace viewer, API and web in one tool. But even Playwright is still fundamentally deterministic.

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By deterministic, we mean that Playwright used to execute exactly what you tell it to do, in the form of test automation scripts. It did not understand context or intent.

Playwright HTTP Basic Auth Automation

Divya Manohar
Co-Founder and CEO, DevAssure

HTTP Basic Authentication is a simple authentication scheme built into the HTTP protocol. It prompts users with a browser dialog box to enter their username and password before granting access to a web resource. Unlike standard web login forms that are part of the webpage, Basic Auth uses a browser-level popup, which can be tricky to automate in end-to-end testing frameworks like Playwright.

MailSlurp with Playwright vs DevAssure

Divya Manohar
Co-Founder and CEO, DevAssure

In today's fast paced development landscape, it's crucial to ensure the email functionality within your application works seamlessly. Emails are included in various flows of the application to enhance user experience - confirmation emails to validate the email id during sign ups, email OTP for logins, password resets, notifications to end users, or transactional emails. Bugs in emails can prevent new users from signing up or existing users to churn away. In this blog post, we'll explore how you can integrate MailSlurp with Playwright for robust email testing and introduce DevAssure—a next-generation platform that takes email testing to a whole new level.