Show HN: Generate E2E tests for your applications from its URL
Hi Hackernews, I’m Marvin from playrun.dev (https://playrun.dev), a platform for generating end-to-end tests for your application using just the URL.
I recently worked on a project rewrite with a small team on a tight deadline. We needed to keep shipping while also writing tests for the application. We believed unit tests were a waste of time and decided e2e tests were the way to go, but doing so manually was still time-consuming and made shipping slower.
Testing is one of those things we do as engineers that don’t have immediate ROI, and it was almost impossible to make the business team understand why we needed to do it and why we were spending so much time on it.
Augmenting testing with AI helps reduce the dev hours we invest in testing so we can focus on shipping, which is very important to the business and users.
Basically, playrun.dev crawls through your application and discovers possible user flows. Once a flow is found, it is mapped step by step, and each step is run and evaluated to ensure it’s correct before the next step is mapped until it can be determined that the flow has ended.
Under the hood, we use multi-agent LLM to discover flows and generate tests.
All that is needed is to provide the public URL to a testing version of your application (please don’t use production URLs, lots of dummy data will be generated). We will navigate the whole application and generate Playwright tests. We also provide a CLI tool to export generated tests directly to your Playwright project.
Although this isn’t perfect (we still had to review and manually fix a few tests), it was able to generate almost perfect tests for about 70% - 80% of flows in our applications (>90% on some runs, we hope to reproduce that consistently).
We still have some limitations and gotchas around Captchas and 3rd party authentication (Google and some other providers block testing browsers as bots and the only way we are able to get around Captchas for now is by disabling it on our testing server).
Additionally we are working on ability to generate, manage and run you e2e tests on a schedule in one place. So regressions can be detected faster on autopilot and if application flows changes, they can be easily be remapped without writing a line of code.
You can try it today at https://playrun.dev.
I’m really happy to show this to you all, thanks for reading about it, please let me know your thoughts and questions in the comment.
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