We have already presented the Capture & Replay service in previous posts (here and here). In short, it is a native Web implementation of the 3270 and 5250 protocols that allows to connect to zOS and AS400 online applications, record all user interactions and screen content in order to generate a test script that can be automatically launched on the modernized application. The unique target testing framework was Selenium. This test allows to check and validate the functional equivalence of the modernized application compared to the legacy one.
Working backward with our customers (delivering mainframe modernization projects) and in order to offer alternatives to a slow and risky Selenium project (too many bugs since the last version with almost no fixes), we decided to support other frameworks.
We are happy to announce the support of Playwright scripts generation in TypeScript and JavaScript. The extensibility of this framework allows us to provide basic scripts (made of dozens of lines of code) that will leverage the JSON file (containing all the interactions and fields of the recording). This separation of the script and the content of the test allows a high flexibility, simplifies debugging and speeds up the migration to other testing frameworks, if needed. As a simple code snippet, developers can use the same environment to modernize and test without the need to install specific environments like Selenium. In addition, SCM tools can be leveraged for the scripts to streamline the integration into a CI/CD pipeline leveraging the official Playwright Docker image.
Last but not least, we are intensive users of Playwright to run end-to-end tests on AWS Blu Insights. We recommend it!
Now, go build!