Top 5 Playwright Interview Questions (Quick Revision)

Introduction

Five questions, thirty minutes of preparation. This is the absolute minimum revision set for a Playwright interview — the questions that appear in nearly every first-round screen, phrased slightly differently each time.

The Top 5 Questions

1. What is auto-waiting in Playwright?

Before every action Playwright runs actionability checks: the element must be attached, visible, stable (not animating), able to receive events, and enabled. It retries those checks until the timeout expires, which removes the vast majority of the sleeps and explicit waits you would write in Selenium.

2. Which locator strategies should you prefer?

In order: getByRole, getByLabel, getByPlaceholder, getByText, getByTestId, and only then CSS or XPath. Role and label locators mirror how a user (and a screen reader) finds the element, so they break far less often than brittle CSS chains.

3. What is the Page Object Model and why use it?

A POM wraps a page or component in a class that exposes intent-level methods (login(user), addToCart(sku)) and hides locators. It centralises change: when the DOM moves, you edit one file instead of forty specs.

4. What causes flaky tests?

Four families: timing (asserting before the app settles), shared state (tests fighting over the same data), environment (network, third-party services, CI resource starvation), and non-determinism in the app itself (animations, random ordering, dates). Diagnosing which family you are in is most of the fix.

5. How does Playwright differ from Selenium?

Selenium talks to browsers over the WebDriver protocol and needs explicit waits; Playwright talks over the DevTools/CDP-style protocol with a persistent connection, giving it auto-waiting, network interception, and a much faster feedback loop. Playwright also bundles the runner, reporting and tracing, whereas Selenium relies on TestNG/JUnit/pytest plus separate reporting libraries.

Summary

Auto-waiting, locator strategy, Page Objects, flakiness and the Selenium comparison. Answer those five confidently and you will clear most screening rounds; then work through the Top 10 and the full 100-question set for the deeper technical stages.