Halmurat T.
Halmurat T.

Senior SDET

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The Dispatch

Weekly QA notes from the trenches.

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© 2026 Halmurat T.

Automation 24
  • Selenium
  • Playwright
  • Appium
  • Cypress
AI Testing 5
CI/CD 6
  • GitHub Actions
  • Slack Reporting
QA Strategy 4
Case Studies 5
All posts

Automation

Practical guides on Playwright, Selenium, framework design, selector strategy, and the patterns that keep enterprise UI suites maintainable.

All (44) Automation (24) AI Testing (5) CI/CD (6) QA Strategy (4) Case Studies (5)
Automation
April 21, 2026 / 11 min

Playwright 1.59's Screencast API Ends Useless Test Videos

Playwright 1.59 ships a Screencast API with burned-in action annotations and chapter markers. Microsoft sells it for AI agents — the real win is CI triage.

Filed under playwright /trace-viewer
Automation
April 2, 2026 / 13 min

Contract Testing vs API Testing — What's the Difference?

Contract testing and API testing look similar but they catch very different bugs. Here's where contract testing fits next to unit, API, and E2E tests.

Filed under api-testing /design-patterns
Automation
March 24, 2026 / 13 min

Parallel Execution Without the Refactor Tax

Thread-level parallelism demands ThreadLocal and full framework rewrites. Process-level parallelism doesn't. Here's the difference and when to use each.

Filed under selenium /parallel-execution
Automation
March 19, 2026 / 9 min

Stop Using locator() for Everything in Playwright

Most Playwright teams still use CSS selectors via locator() out of habit. getByRole and getByText find elements the way users do — and survive redesigns.

Filed under playwright /selenium
Automation
March 17, 2026 / 12 min

Shared Test Users Are Sabotaging Your Parallel Suite

How shared test accounts create race conditions in parallel Playwright runs, and the 3 isolation patterns that eliminated our 12% failure rate overnight.

Filed under playwright /parallel-execution
Automation
March 12, 2026 / 8 min

Stop Launching a Browser Per Test in Playwright

Launching a new browser per test in Playwright wastes 3-6 seconds each time. BrowserContext gives you the same isolation in milliseconds. Here's how to switch.

Filed under playwright /selenium
Automation
March 10, 2026 / 10 min

Playwright's storageState() Is Contaminating Your Tests

storageState() saves cookies, localStorage, and sessionStorage in one blob. Here's how it silently poisons parallel tests and how to strip it to cookies only.

Filed under playwright /parallel-execution
Automation
March 5, 2026 / 15 min

Selenium vs Playwright in 2026: Same Test, Two Frameworks

We build the exact same Java test in both Selenium and Playwright side by side. See the real code differences in setup, locators, network mocking, and debugging

Filed under selenium /playwright
Automation
March 3, 2026 / 6 min

The Browser Errors Your Test Suite Never Catches

Your UI tests pass green while the console throws errors. Learn to catch JavaScript and page errors in Selenium and Playwright Java — before users do.

Filed under playwright /selenium
Automation
February 26, 2026 / 12 min

Your Test Suite Is Slow for 5 Reasons — Not Just One

Parallelism alone won't save your slow test suite. Here are five layers of optimization — from test design to cloud infrastructure — ranked by real impact.

Filed under selenium /parallel-execution
Automation
January 27, 2026 / 5 min

Playwright's onceDialog Has a Silent Handler Leak

Why onceDialog stays registered when no dialog fires, silently eating the next dialog from an unrelated action — and the onDialog/offDialog pattern that fixes it.

Filed under playwright /framework-design
Automation
December 16, 2025 / 12 min

Selenium's Alert Handling Crashed Our Parallel Suite

How UnhandledAlertException broke 8-thread parallel execution and why Playwright's event-driven dialog model avoids that entire failure pattern in practice.

Filed under playwright /selenium
Automation
November 4, 2025 / 3 min

Playwright's onceDialog Saved Me From a Handler Leak — Until It Didn't

How onceDialog fixes permanent handler leaks from onDialog — and the one case where it creates a new problem. Includes the onDialog/offDialog pattern for dialogs that might not fire.

Filed under playwright /framework-design
Automation
December 10, 2024 / 5 min

From Selenium Wrappers to Playwright Locators

How Playwright's locator API eliminates the need for custom wrapper classes we spent weeks building in Selenium, and when wrappers still make sense today.

Filed under selenium /playwright
Automation
August 6, 2024 / 8 min

How We Stopped Arguing About Whose Tests Failed

Use Cucumber squad tags and Extent Reports to route test failures to the right team automatically, with full implementation details for Appium projects.

Filed under selenium /framework-design
Automation
May 28, 2024 / 7 min

Your Selectors Keep Breaking — Start Using Text

Why text-based locators reduce test maintenance by up to 60%, and how to use them in Selenium and Playwright with real enterprise UI examples that last.

Filed under selenium /playwright
Automation
March 19, 2024 / 5 min

Managing UI Text in Test Automation

When to use properties files, enums, or spreadsheets for UI text in test automation, and how to keep assertions maintainable across locales and releases.

Filed under test-automation /java
Automation
January 23, 2024 / 8 min

Testing Webhooks Requires a Different Strategy

Why your API testing patterns fail for webhooks, and the listener-based strategy that fixed our CI pipeline after a full week of production-style debugging.

Filed under api-testing /framework-design
Automation
May 16, 2023 / 9 min

What Makes a Good Test?

A practical guide to writing tests that catch broken behavior, fail for useful reasons, and keep earning trust in noisy enterprise CI pipelines over time.

Filed under java /testing
Automation
February 7, 2023 / 6 min

Migrating Off Cypress? Here's When to Keep It

An honest take on Cypress vs Playwright migrations from an SDET who's done three, including the signals that tell you not to migrate your suite just yet.

Filed under cypress /playwright
Automation
October 18, 2022 / 6 min

The Async Trap Behind Flaky Playwright Tests

The 3 async mistakes that cause flaky Playwright tests after a Selenium migration, and how we fixed a 23% intermittent failure rate in our CI pipeline.

Filed under playwright /framework-design
Automation
June 14, 2022 / 11 min

Thread Safety in Parallel Tests: The 3-Day Bug

How a shared WebDriver instance caused phantom failures in our 800-test parallel suite, and the ThreadLocal pattern that finally stabilized the whole run.

Filed under java /parallel-execution
Automation
October 12, 2021 / 4 min

Tight vs Loose Coupling in Java Test Design

A practical explanation of tight and loose coupling in Java, with examples that show why dependency boundaries matter for maintainability and testing.

Filed under java /loose-coupling
Automation
June 29, 2021 / 8 min

XPath text() vs Dot — Why Your Text Match Fails

The real difference between XPath text(), dot, contains(), and normalize-space() for test automation — with examples that explain real flaky failures.

Filed under selenium /playwright
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Halmurat T. — Senior SDET writing about test automation, CI/CD, and QA strategy from 10+ years in the enterprise trenches.

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