Secrets of Dynamic Playwright Locators Without a Page Object Model

Dynamic Playwright locators without a page object model keep your tests simple and maintainable. Instead of building complex object hierarchies, use semantic selectors like getByRole() and getByLabel() that adapt naturally when your UI changes. Put reusable interaction wrappers—like custom click(), fill(), select(), and expect() methods—into helper functions for focused utilities, or into fixtures for shared state and setup. Beginners get tests that are easy to read and understand. Advanced practitioners can build sophisticated locator strategies using relative positioning, data attributes, and intelligent chaining. By prioritizing accessibility-first selectors, your team gets faster feedback, easier on-boarding, and much lower maintenance—making your test suite more scalable and your SDETs more productive.

Speaker Biography:

Paul Grossman Paul Grossman is known in the industry as the Dark Arts Wizard of AI Driven Test Automation. He has been a Test Automation Champion and Evangelist for 20+ years. He began as a Software Developer Engineer in Test with Mercury WinRunner before working with QTP/UFT for 16 years. He has experience in numerous test automation tool sets including Playwright in TypeScript, Selenium with Java and WebdriverIO in JavaScript.

In the past, he has automated the testing of medical equipment, insurance policies and entertainment kiosks. He is currently an independent consultant for a Trucking company automating the regression suite of tests with low code automation platforms. This also included providing mocks-ups of feature enhancements often requested by customers. Prior to that, he was a Project Manager for a freight tracking company based in Ann Arbor handling a WebdriverIO suite comprised of 1200+ automated test cases running every night.

In 2023, he co-authored "Enhanced Test Automation with WebdriverIO: Unlocking the Superpowers of Hybrid Testing Frameworks" with Larry Goddard. This was based on his years of experience to help new SDETs avoid real-world pitfalls and challenges. More books with Playwright and Cypress are in the planning stages.

Paul has been a conference speaker since 2004 including ZappleTech's monthly meetups and Joe Colantonio's Test Guild every Halloween. These always include a live demos, sharing tips from his experiences, with a little humor and the occasional magic trick. When Paul is not spending time automating test cases, he is producing demo videos on his a fledgling TikTok account as well as his YouTube and TwiX accounts with thousands of followers.

He just started a live multi-stream channel on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitch.

Paul's current passion is learning more about Agentic AI and self-healing tests