ORIGINAL REDDIT POST
How are you guys testing Apps/websites these days?
How do non tech people test apps? Are you guys using some frameworks? The last few months I have been building few apps, amd I know nothing of android/iOS, sometimes I fight with Claude for hours to fix things, I was wondering if there's a better solution to…
How do non tech people test apps? Are you guys using some frameworks? The last few months I have been building few apps, amd I know nothing of android/iOS, sometimes I fight with Claude for hours to fix things, I was wondering if there's a better solution to this. I have heard people use playwright, is that the correct choice to test backend and APIs? Any help would be good.
Collected discussion
Playwright is great for end-to-end testing, but I wouldn’t use it for everything. I usually do API tests + unit tests first, then Playwright for important user flows. when building with Claude have it run automated tests after changes instead of debugging by trial and error.
I see, using Playwright for everything is Overkill. API tests and Unit tests to start with. Thanks man.
Playwright is really great for exercising the UI. I use it on my projects. For API, you probably want to ensure that you don't have regressions in your API contracts. One thing I do is publish OpenAI contracts and then test them. You can use Swagger to test the actual structure and then OpenAPI response validator to test if the contract is still valid. This really falls under the heading of "unit tests" where you need to check every API before you commit code. Every API should have a unit test that runs at every commit. That's the only way to detect low level regressions like this for your internal private API. If you support a public API, then you need to test against the API documentation. If the documentation says it should do X, then you need to test that it does X and not XY and Z.
Playwright's a reasonable pick for the flows that matter, i wouldn't try to cover everything with it. honestly i still click through the whole flow myself after the tests pass, and that's where i find most things.
Web apps - cypress. Native - playwright.