Migrating a Selenium suite to Playwright

Do not rewrite everything at once

A big-bang rewrite pauses regression coverage for months. Run both suites in parallel: the legacy suite guards production while the new suite is built feature by feature.

Start with the highest-maintenance specs

Pick the ten tests your team fixes most often. They usually depend on explicit waits, frames or downloads — exactly the areas where Playwright's auto-waiting and context APIs pay for themselves immediately.

Translate patterns, not lines

WebDriverWait plus expected conditions becomes a web-first assertion. Actions chains become a single locator call. Thread-local drivers become worker-scoped fixtures.

// Selenium
new WebDriverWait(driver, ofSeconds(10))
  .until(visibilityOfElementLocated(By.id("total")));

// Playwright
await expect(page.locator('#total')).toBeVisible();

Retire the old suite deliberately

Delete a legacy spec the same day its replacement lands and passes three consecutive nightly runs. Two suites forever is the worst possible outcome.