From zero QA process to full automation —
then 10× faster with Playwright.
A fast-growing product company had the team and the clients but none of the engineering process. No CI/CD, no structured QA, no automation — just a fast-moving codebase that relied on manual testing and developer judgment before every release. We built the entire QA discipline from scratch, then led the migration from thousands of Selenium tests to Playwright — cutting execution time by 90% and unifying the dev and QA tech stack into a single shared codebase.
CI/CD, version control, Jira, release management, and a full automation framework — all from a standing start
Full regression suite cut to one-tenth of the original Selenium runtime through Playwright's native parallelism
Dev and QA now write in the same language — TypeScript — on the same codebase. No translation layer between teams
Automated regression and sign-off cycle collapsed from days to hours, enabling rapid, confident releases
Building QA from nothing
CI/CD pipeline, version control process, Jira-based project management, release management, and a full Java + Selenium + BDD automation framework — built from the ground up for a team that had none of it.
Selenium → Playwright
Thousands of Java Selenium tests migrated to TypeScript Playwright. Execution time cut to one-tenth. Dev and QA unified on a single language and codebase. Flaky tests eliminated.
Building QA discipline from a standing start.
The team was talented and fast-moving — but without process, speed creates instability. Every deliverable in Phase 1 was chosen to reduce risk while preserving the team's ability to ship quickly.
- Jira set up for feature tracking, bug management, sprint planning, and release notes
- Git branching strategy defined — feature branches, PR reviews, protected main
- Environments defined: dev, QA, staging, production with promotion gates between each
- Release management process with versioned tags, changelogs, and sign-off checklists
- Build pipeline triggered on every PR — compile, unit tests, static analysis
- Automated test suite execution on merge to main and staging branches
- Deployment pipeline to staging on green build, production on manual approval
- Slack and email notifications for build failures, test failures, and deployments
- Java + Selenium + Cucumber BDD framework built from scratch
- Feature files written in Gherkin — business-readable, dev/QA/product aligned
- Page Object Model pattern for UI tests — maintainable, no selector duplication
- REST Assured for API automation — contract tests, integration tests, regression suite
- Core user journeys automated end-to-end across all major flows
- API layer tested independently — response schemas, status codes, data integrity
- Regression suite scoped to cover every release without manual re-testing
- Smoke suite for post-deployment verification — runs in under 10 minutes
Why Selenium had to go.
The Selenium suite worked — but it was brittle, slow, and written in a language that the application developers could not read. Playwright solved all three problems simultaneously.
Same tests. One-tenth the time.
One language. Two teams. No translation layer.
Before the migration, there was an invisible wall between development and QA. The application was written in JavaScript and TypeScript. The tests were written in Java. A developer looking at a failing QA test had to context-switch into a completely different language, toolchain, and set of idioms just to understand what the test was asserting.
The result was a predictable pattern: QA investigated all test failures, developers waited for QA to triage, and the feedback loop stretched. QA was a bottleneck — not by fault, but by structure.
With Playwright and TypeScript, the test code lives in the same ecosystem as the application code. A developer can open a failing test, understand it immediately, and fix it or flag it in minutes. QA engineers who understand the application framework can contribute to developer unit tests. The boundary between the two disciplines became permeable — and the whole team became more effective because of it.
Thousands of tests. No big bang.
Migrating a large test suite all at once is a recipe for a regression gap. We migrated in parallel — keeping Selenium live until Playwright proved parity, area by area.
Audit and prioritise the Selenium suite
Before migrating a single test, we audited the full Selenium suite — categorising tests by stability, execution frequency, business criticality, and maintenance cost. High-value, frequently-run tests were migrated first. Tests that were already flaky in Selenium were redesigned during migration rather than ported as-is.
Framework scaffold in TypeScript
A new Playwright framework was scaffolded in TypeScript with the same structural patterns the QA team already understood — Page Object Model, test data factories, environment configuration. The familiar structure meant the team could contribute from day one without learning a completely new paradigm.
Parallel run period
For a defined period, both suites ran in CI. Playwright results were compared against Selenium results on each build. Discrepancies were investigated and resolved. When a Playwright test consistently passed where the Selenium equivalent was flaky, the Selenium test was retired rather than investigated.
Developer onboarding
Once the Playwright suite reached parity, the application developers were onboarded onto the test codebase. They could now read failing tests, add assertions to existing tests, and write new tests for features as they built them. The handoff from QA to dev for test ownership happened gradually, not in a single event.
Selenium decommission
Selenium was decommissioned section by section as Playwright coverage reached parity for each area. The CI pipeline was updated to remove Selenium steps incrementally. By the end, the old Java framework was removed entirely and the build time dropped dramatically.
The full stack across both phases
Shipping fast but testing slow?
Whether you need to build a QA function from scratch, modernise an existing Selenium suite, or establish CI/CD discipline — we have done it at scale and can do it for your team.