I joined a project with an existing Playwright E2E test suite, 38 spec files, ~165 tests, around 14,000 lines of test infrastructure. My first step was simple: run the tests locally.
8 out of 130 non-skipped tests passed. A 6% pass rate.
The confusing part? CI was green. It turned out CI ran everything with workers: 1, multiple workers plus the dev environment meant running tests locally just wasn't possible.
Step 1: Analysis — asking questions I didn't know the answers to
I had zero domain knowledge of this codebase. No context on why tests were written a certain way, what the custom wrappers did, or where the real problems were. So I started asking AI to analyze everything, the Playwright configs, the page objects, the spec files, the CI workflows. I asked questions to help me understand the codebase and to figure out what we could do to get tests running locally.
