Most teams over-abstract too early. Four custom commands are worth writing on every Cypress project — login, seed, intercept, visit. The rest can wait.
Cypress retries commands until they pass or time out — but only some commands, and only some of the time. Understanding which is the difference between solid tests and flaky ones.
POM was a Selenium-era solution to a Selenium-era problem. In modern Cypress and Playwright, custom commands and locator helpers cover 90% of what POM was supposed to give you.
After shipping production suites in both, here's the honest breakdown — where Playwright pulls ahead, where Cypress still wins, and the single factor that should actually decide it.
Our CI was failing 18% of runs to flakes we'd stopped looking at. One week, four changes, no new tests. Here's what we actually did.
Cypress has three features that look similar but solve completely different problems. Fixtures are static data. Tasks are Node-side escape hatches. Intercepts are network shape. Here's the boundary.
cy.intercept is the most powerful command in Cypress and the one teams most often misuse. Here's the playbook: when to alias, when to stub, when to spy, and the race-condition-shaped bug that intercepts usually catch.
There's a take going around that data-testid 'couples tests to implementation.' It's exactly backwards — data-testid is the only selector explicitly decoupled from implementation.