Playwright / Quiz

The Black Box Recorder

trace: 'on-first-retry', DOM snapshots you can inspect, and reading a CI failure like a crash investigator instead of rerunning it forty times.

Difficulty
Medium
Format
Quiz
Points
150
Estimate
9 min

// MISSION BRIEF

Your Mission

A test fails once a week, only in CI, only at 3 AM. You will never reproduce it locally. The trace file already recorded everything: every action, every DOM state, every request.

This quiz covers trace configuration, what a trace actually contains, and how investigators use it.

Speed bonus active.

// FIRST CONTACT

Battle teaser

The commonly recommended CI trace setting, and why:

  1. Atrace: 'on-first-retry', records only when a test fails and retries, near-zero overhead on green runs
  2. BThere is no trace option in the config
  3. Ctrace: 'on', record everything always, disk is free
  4. Dtrace: 'off', traces are a local-only tool
Answers, scoring, hints, and the full battle stay sealed.

// SKILL TAGS

playwrighttrace-viewerdebuggingci-cde2e-testing