The testing community is facing a recurring and costly challenge:
How do you modernize and manage large portfolios of UI tests that have become slow, fragile, and hard to maintain?
This isn’t just a technical concern; it’s a business-critical issue. Many engineering teams are realizing that their test automation pipelines, once seen as a sign of maturity, are now bloated with brittle UI tests that delay releases, consume resources, and frustrate developers.
The UI Testing Dilemma
UI tests are invaluable for validating user-facing functionality and critical paths. But when overused, they become a bottleneck:
❌ Slow pipelines due to long-running tests
❌ Increased flakiness and false negatives
❌ High maintenance overhead and poor developer productivity
It’s no wonder that many teams are asking: Is there a better way to approach this?
Loadmill + Playwright: A New Integration for Hybrid Test Automation
To help teams break this cycle, we’ve launched a new integration between Loadmill and Playwright, designed specifically for modernization.
Here’s how it helps:
✅ Run Playwright tests inside Loadmill with zero extra setup, and reuse your existing test suite.
✅ Blend UI and API steps in a single test flow. UI steps are only used where strictly necessary (e.g., visual validation), while the rest shift to faster, stable API tests.
✅ Auto-share sessions and data (cookies, tokens, parameters) between API and UI steps, no brittle test setup scripts.
✅ Get rich unified reports with HTML output, screenshots, and video playback.
✅ Use AI refactoring suggestions to identify flaky UI tests and recommend API-based replacements, reducing ongoing test suite bloat.
A Clear Strategy to Modernize
With this hybrid testing model, teams can:
🔍 Analyze legacy UI tests and detect candidates for API conversion.
🧠 Retain only the essential UI tests for visual or browser-specific flows.
⚙️ Gradually evolve from UI-heavy test suites into streamlined, scalable automation portfolios.
All without discarding the work you've already done.
Smarter Testing, Not Just More Testing
Modern test automation isn’t about “more tests.” It’s about applying the right kind of test to each layer of your product.
By combining Playwright and Loadmill’s strengths, teams can accelerate delivery, reduce failures, and cut back on test maintenance.
Smarter Testing, Not Just More Testing
Let’s Talk
If your team is facing this challenge, we’d love to hear from you.
What strategies have worked for you?
Where have you struggled?
Are you using Playwright, Selenium, Cypress, or another framework?
Let’s start a conversation on how to build smarter, faster, and more resilient test automation for modern development teams.