Every software development and QA team hits meaningful milestones in their work. Sometimes, these milestones celebrate achievements, like pushing a large software release. Other times, they include challenges, such as scaling to a particular point in size where new challenges crop up.
One of the more common challenge-centric milestones tends to occur when a Playwright suite reaches about 100 tests total. At this level of scale, teams tend to notice that their tests take longer to execute, and sometimes fail entirely.
There’s no obvious reason why, but the culprit is usually authentication. Authentication problems lead to login overhead and failures, silently dragging down test strategies. The issue is only growing worse, but there are tools and platforms that teams can use to mitigate these issues.
The growing challenge of authentication in automated testing
In the past, when authentication workflows involved simple password/username logins, authentication didn’t tend to be a major barrier to testing efficiency or speed. That has changed as organizations have moved to more complex identity management and authentication systems. Now, multifactor authentication (MFA), single sign-on (SSO), and the like have become the norm.
This evolution is great from a security perspective, and no business should turn the clock back on modern identity management and authentication.
Nevertheless, more complex authentication processes create a real challenge for automated testing teams. Not only do they require engineers to configure more complex login logic in tests, but they can also slow down test execution due to the added time of completing MFA workflows, syncing local user identities with central identity and access management (IAM) databases and so on.
Even worse, authentication problems can sometimes cause tests to fail entirely. Tests can’t execute when hard-coded passwords are out of date, for example, or when a remote identity management server is unreachable because the test is running in an air-gapped network environment.
These are challenges that are easy enough to solve when you have just a few dozen or fewer tests to run. At that scale, you can manually identify and fix auth issues one by one. Or you can opt for the even simpler approach of running all your tests as a single user.
But when you reach the threshold of around 100 tests, manually troubleshooting authentication processes, or testing everything using the same account, starts to become infeasible.
Leapwork Play: Managing authentication at scale
Authentication is one of the challenges that becomes more difficult as a Playwright suite grows. Addressing it effectively requires not only reliable login workflows, but also a way to govern and maintain the broader test suite as it scales.
Leapwork Play bridges the gap between Playwright and enterprise identity management systems by adding the governance, reuse, deterministic execution, and audit trail that enterprise teams need around Playwright. Using specialized authentication knowledge, Play optimizes login workflows to speed up testing and helps detect and troubleshoot broken authentication. By importing and reusing existing Playwright source without requiring a rewrite, Play helps teams manage growing test suites more consistently, investigate failures more clearly, and reduce the maintenance burden as applications change.
