Session Times
13:00 - 14:30
16:00 - 17:00
Speaker Biography
Joe is a Senior Consultant at Planit, specializing in the architecture of open-source automation frameworks and the intersection of AI with software testing. With over a decade of experience in the field, he has partnered with clients across a diverse range of industries to deliver robust automation test strategies, test management solutions, and high-impact process improvements. His work focuses on ensuring high-quality automation frameworks that are both scalable for the enterprise and innovative in its design.
Beyond technical architecture, Joe is deeply passionate about empowering the engineering community. He has driven multiple AI initiatives within Planit and through personal projects, constantly pushing the boundaries of what is possible in modern testing. As a mentor, Joe adopts a holistic approach. He emphasizes not only the acquisition of hard technical skills but also the soft skills required to articulate and present the true business value of engineering work to stakeholders.
Outside of work, Joe dedicates his time to a mix of creative and physical pursuits along with family time. He is an avid guitar player and powerlifter who loves getting off the grid through camping, fishing, overlanding, and 4-wheel-driving.
Workshop Description
The promise of AI isn't just writing code faster; it's maintaining it with zero effort, especially when interacting with dynamic applications. Agentic Automation changes the game by giving your test suite the ability to reason, adapt, and recover. This workshop is a practical blueprint for shifting your daily workflow from "writing scripts" to "supervising agents."
We will tackle the single biggest pain point in test automation: Maintenance. Using Playwright MCP and TypeScript, we will build a test suite for a fragile application and watch it break—then we will engineer the agents required to fix it. You will learn to implement the "Self-Healing Loop," a pattern where your automation framework detects failures, inspects the live application state, and rewrites its own selectors in real-time.
This hands-on session is designed for engineers aiming to deliver robust and resilient automation. We will delve into prompt engineering strategies, Playwright best practices, and coding agent techniques, empowering you to shift from constant test supervision to confidently trusting your test suite.
Prerequisites:
☐ Node.js 20+ installed
☐ npm or yarn package manager available and updated
☐ Install Playwright for TypeScript → npm i -D @playwright/test
☐ VS Code (recommended) or another TypeScript-friendly IDE → Download VS Code
☐ Git installed and configured → Download Git
☐ GitHub Copilot subscription (recommended) or other LLM provider (Claude, ChatGPT, BYO, etc.)
☐ Familiarity with web testing (DOM, selectors, assertions)
☐ Comfortable with Git and command-line tooling
☐ Basic understanding of TypeScript syntax and async/await