Let me tell you a story. You join a new team. They have 800 Selenium tests. On Monday, 780 pass. On Tuesday, same code, same app -- 760 pass. Nobody changed anything. The team calls these "flaky tests" and ignores failures. Eventually nobody trusts the test suite. That is the reality at most companies.
If your team spends more time debugging test failures than writing new tests, your tool or approach has a fundamental problem. Do not normalize flaky tests.
Playwright was built specifically to solve these problems. Not as a patch or a plugin -- but baked into the core architecture. Auto-wait is not optional. It is how Playwright works.
Q: What is a flaky test and how do you deal with it?
A: A flaky test is one that passes and fails without any code change. Root causes include timing issues, shared test data, or environment differences. The fix depends on the cause: use auto-waiting tools like Playwright to eliminate timing issues, isolate test data per test, and use containers for consistent environments. Never just retry and ignore -- find the root cause.
Key Point: Flaky tests erode trust. The best automation tool is one that makes flakiness structurally difficult.