How most teams manage today
Where do your Playwright tests live?
Every run overwrites the last
Ask which test failed in the last build and there’s nothing left to open.
Artifacts expire before audits
By the time compliance asks for evidence, your CI provider has already cleared it.
Coverage can’t be computed
A repo holds code. The requirements it’s meant to prove live somewhere else entirely.
Manual work has no home
Exploratory notes and manual cases end up in a spreadsheet nobody fully trusts.
A repository is an excellent place to store 4,000 tests. It’s a terrible place to answer which of them still mean anything, who owns them, what they duplicate, and what they leave uncovered.
What Arcus adds
Everything your suite forgets, kept
A durable record of every test and every run, a home for the tests that will never be code, and a requirement-to-test join that survives a refactor. Playwright keeps running the tests. Testsigma answers the questions the repo can’t.
Test cases
Manual and automated,
one list
Your specs sync in as managed cases, and the manual pack and exploratory work sit beside them. Bring in whatever’s already in a spreadsheet or your old tool.
Run history
Kept on a clock
you set
Run history and pass/fail trends across manual and automated execution, in one view. Still there when the auditor asks, long after the artifacts cleared.
Traceability
Requirement to test
to bug
Jira sync supplies the requirement side, in both directions. When a run fails, capture it as a screen recording with the environment attached and file it without leaving the page.
Setup to first report
Live before your next nightly run
No rewrite, no migration project, no new build step. Point it at the pipeline you already have and the record starts filling itself.
Point it at your pipeline
Your specs and their results arrive as managed test cases.
Bring in the rest
Import the manual pack from a spreadsheet or your current tool. Link everything to the story it proves.
Read the report
Failure trends, run history, and the stories with nothing pointed at them.
Nothing gets rewritten. Nobody retypes anything. Turn it off and your suite runs exactly as it does today.
| Test | Source | Last run | Last 30 days | Story |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Checkout, payment failure retry | Playwright | Passed | 3 failures | PAY-412 |
| SSO login via Okta | Playwright | Failed | 11 failures | AUTH-88 |
| Refund on partial shipment | Manual | 2 Aug | Monthly | ORD-201 |
| Screen reader through checkout | Exploratory | 14 Aug | Ad hoc | ACC-19 |
| No test | — | — | — | SEARCH-45 |
Two things must read at a glance: Playwright specs and manual tests in the same list, and the last row, a story with nothing pointed at it.
Git, legacy tools, Testsigma
Where each setup runs out
Three ways to keep a record of a Playwright suite, and the point at which each one stops answering.
| Git + Reporter | Legacy test management tools | Testsigma | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Manual and exploratory tests | Nowhere | In a second system | Beside the automated ones |
| Run history | Expires with the artifact | Only what you tagged | Kept, manual and automated |
| Rename a test | History resets | Duplicate case appears | Record follows the test |
| Requirement traceability | None | Linked by hand | Two-way Jira sync |
| Who can read it | Anyone with CI access | Anyone with a seat | Anyone with a link |
Frequently Asked Questions
Playwright gives you a test runner, a trace viewer and a set of reporters. What it doesn’t give you is a place to keep a manual test case, or a history that survives your CI retention window.
Playwright test management is the layer that holds those things. Your specs stay in Git and keep running in your pipeline. The record of what exists, what ran and what it covers lives somewhere a person can read.
A repo is an excellent home for test code. It versions with the app, it enforces review, and a broken test tells you the moment it breaks.
The strain shows up elsewhere. Test identity in Playwright is the title string, so renaming a spec resets everything you knew about it. The HTML report overwrites itself on every run. GitHub Actions clears artifacts after 90 days by default and GitLab.com after 30, and most teams shorten that further when they hit storage quotas.
None of that matters at 50 tests and 4 people. At 500 tests and a team split between automation and manual work, folder structure and tags stop being enough for test organization, someone starts keeping a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet starts breaking quietly.
See what your suite covers