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Playwright MCP vs. Playwright CLI: A Hands-On Guide for Practitioners

Aswin

Aswin Golla

Lead Quality Engineer
Bunnings

Session Times

13:00 - 14:30

16:00 - 17:00

Speaker Biography

Aswin Golla is a Quality Engineering leader with two decades of hands-on experience building and scaling test automation across some of Australia and New Zealand's most complex digital platforms, currently working as Lead Quality Engineer, Engineering Platforms at Bunnings. His career spans retail, hospitality, telecommunications, health tech, life sciences, banking and finance, and technology, giving him a rare cross-industry perspective on what quality engineering actually looks like at scale, beyond the conference slides. Aswin has extensive experience working across web, mobile, API, and legacy platforms. A US Patent co-inventor, NASA Space Apps 2023 Melbourne People's Choice Winner, ANZ Defence Forces Hackathon 3rd place winner, and QA Leader of the Year 2026 finalist, Aswin brings both technical depth and strategic leadership to every room he enters. At Spark New Zealand, he engineered an RPA system that processes 2,000 fibre connection orders weekly and won the Intelligent Automation Awards' Best RPA Bot for Customer Experience in Sydney, demonstrating how quality engineering delivers real-world impact. He holds advanced credentials from Stanford (Cybersecurity), Oxford (AI), and Wharton (Technology Leadership), and is an active mentor bridging academia and industry. He has spoken at apidays on API testing strategy, previously presented at Testing Talks and the Innovate QA 2025 conference in Seattle.

Workshop Description

Test automation has a maintenance problem. Selectors break, applications change, and engineers spend more time fixing tests than shipping quality. Playwright MCP introduces a fundamentally different way of thinking about browser automation, one where an AI agent reasons about the application state and adapts in real time. This workshop takes a practitioner's approach to one of the most debated questions in modern quality engineering: when do you reach for Playwright MCP, and when does a well-structured CLI-driven test suite simply win? Through live, side-by-side demos built on real-world scenarios, attendees will see both approaches in action, understand the trade-offs in control, debuggability, CI/CD integration, and reliability, and walk away with a clear framework for choosing the right tool for the right job. No vendor pitch, no theoretical overview. Just two approaches, a working codebase, and honest conclusions.

Prerequisites:

☐ Node.js LTS (Long-Term Support) v24.14.0 or later installed → nodejs.org/en/download
☐ pnpm package manager installed and up to date → pnpm.io/installation
☐ Playwright installed (which includes Playwright CLI) → pnpm add -D @playwright/test
☐ Playwright browsers installed → pnpm exec playwright install
☐ Playwright MCP server installed → pnpm add -D @playwright/mcp
☐ VS Code (recommended) or any TypeScript-friendly IDE → code.visualstudio.com
☐ VS Code extensions installed: Playwright Test for VS Code (ms-playwright.playwright), ESLint, Prettier, and GitHub Copilot or equivalent LLM extension
☐ GitHub account → github.com/signup
☐ An LLM provider account (Claude, ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, or similar) for MCP agent demos
☐ Claude Desktop or an MCP-compatible client installed
☐ Working knowledge of TypeScript, async/await patterns, core browser automation concepts (selectors, assertions, page objects), and comfortable working in the command line and terminal

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