Momentum Energy was looking for a product to work with Playwright, while accelerating quality at scale.
50% decrease in time spent on test creation
70% decrease in time spent on test updates
90% decrease in test maintenance time
Momentum Energy, an Australian energy retailer, was on a journey to elevate its test automation maturity. After successfully establishing Playwright as a strong foundation – particularly for API testing – the team saw an opportunity to further accelerate quality at scale. With a mix of automation engineers and functional testers, they sought a solution that would help everyone contribute more effectively while reducing the effort required to maintain tests.
mabl complemented their existing Playwright investment with its Playwright‑based architecture, auto‑healing capabilities, and built‑in support for dynamic test data. This allowed the team to expand participation in UI automation and streamline ongoing maintenance, while continuing to rely on Playwright for robust API testing.
For QA teams who have fewer engineering resources, Playwright’s promise of a powerful, modern testing framework that has record-and-play functionality is really compelling. In theory, it makes testing accessible to everyone on the team, which is hard to pass up when you have less bandwidth.
This promise is exactly what piqued the interest of Momentum Energy’s QA Manager, Firman Sugianto, building the team’s automation program around Playwright. What followed was a story that’s familiar to everyone who has tried to ease the workload for their team.
"We found that it's not working as intended," Firman recalls. "Test creation and test maintenance were basically eating up most of our time."
With a mix of test automation engineers and functional testers (both technical and non-technical) on his team, Firman needed a solution that could do more than promise that record-and-play accessibility — it had to actually deliver it. That search led him to mabl, and to a realization that the answer wasn't in replacing Playwright entirely, but in finally making it work the way he wanted.
When Firman's team adopted Playwright, the goal was clear: build a scalable test automation practice that the whole team could participate in. The scriptless functionality seemed like the key to making that happen. In practice, it didn't work out that way.
The two automation engineers on the team were primarily tasked with writing and rewriting tests, leaving maintenance of the tests on the back burner. At the same time, the functional testers had no way to meaningfully contribute since the “scriptless” promise didn’t bridge the gap between the technical and non-technical teammates.
Over time, the sheer volume of automated tests executed caused the test environment to drift. Data across multiple platforms became increasingly inconsistent and unreliable, making it impossible for automation to depend on static or reused test data. Each test needed to dynamically query the database for fresh data and clean it up afterward to maintain reliability. This was a non-negotiable requirement, and one that raised the bar for any tool they were considering.
"I ask for a very specific way of doing test automation," Firman explains. "It has to have the ability to query the database every time and clean up after the test. That was top of my list."
Playwright, without the right infrastructure around it and, at the time, lacking the AI advancements, couldn't meet all of those needs at scale.
As Firman began researching alternatives, he was clear about one thing: he wasn't looking to throw out what his team had already built. They were heavily invested in a strong API testing framework built on Playwright, with Postman integrations and dynamic data handling already in place. Any new tool would need to complement that investment, not compete with it.
"I'm not the person who just sticks with one tool," Firman says. "I just find what each tool's strength is, and we go from there."
He evaluated a range of no-code and low-code testing tools, honing in on the ones that were making the most of AI capabilities, were easy to use for both technical and non-technical users, and played well with Playwright. He found a good number of the tools he evaluated treated Playwright like a competitor, rather than a framework their tool could complement. mabl was different.
"In an early evaluation call, someone told us that mabl was built based on Playwright," Firman recalls. "And then they explained that you can import, export, and link between Playwright and mabl quite easily. That was absolutely one of the reasons we chose mabl."
The ability to maintain their existing Playwright investment while layering mabl on top wasn't just a nice-to-have, it was a deciding factor.
With mabl in place, Momentum Energy's testing stack has found its natural shape. The division of responsibility is clean and intentional: Playwright handles API testing, where its strengths in backend automation shine. mabl takes ownership of UI testing, where its self-healing capabilities, AI-assisted test creation, and accessibility for both technical and non-technical users make it the right fit.
"In my mind, mabl is best for UI-related testing," Firman explains. "With the self-healing, the database querying, the API integration — but the main purpose is the UI."
The shift unlocked something Firman had been working toward from the start: a testing practice that the whole team could participate in. Functional testers and non-technical users who were previously unable to contribute to writing and maintaining tests can now actively engage in the process alongside the automation engineers. The bottleneck has finally started to loosen.
The self-healing functionality, in particular, has become one of mabl's most celebrated features within the team. "You can just self-heal, like Wolverine," he says with a laugh. "And we can choose which tests get self-healing and which ones we skip — like if we know something is going to change and it's not critical to check. It's great to have that flexibility."
The impact of adding mabl to the stack has been significant and measurable. Compared to their Playwright-only setup, Momentum Energy has seen:
That 90% reduction in maintenance alone represents a fundamental shift in how the team spends its time, moving from reactive upkeep to proactive test coverage.
"It's so amazing in terms of the efficiency that we’ve gained," Firman says.
Beyond the value to their testing speed, Firman points to two things that have made mabl stand out as a long-term partner: the pace of product improvement and the quality of support.
"If I'm not logging into mabl for a couple of days, I'm already behind," he says. "That amazes me. And if we see a bug in the product, not long after that, it's fixed."
That responsiveness matters especially for a team operating from Australia, where the time zone difference with mabl's US-based team could easily become a barrier. Instead, mabl's 24-hour online support channels and the Friends of mabl Slack community have helped bridge the gap, giving Firman's team a way to raise issues, find workarounds, and learn from other users, no matter what time of day it is.
"It's been amazing to have that kind of online support where you can just raise something straight away," he says.
Firman has shared his team's journey at internal sessions of 30, 50, and 200-plus attendees, and the questions he gets most often come from teams wrestling with the same challenges he faced. His advice is consistent.
Start with your test automation strategy. Be intentional about which tests need to run frequently, which belong in your CI/CD pipeline, and which are part of regression. Once you have clarity there, honestly assess whether the effort required to maintain your test suite is justified by the results you're getting.
"When maintenance effort outweighs the value of your test automation, that’s a signal to rethink your approach and look for ways to deliver results faster," he says.
And when it comes to the open-source-versus-paid-tool debate, Firman urges teams to stay open-minded. Open source has real advantages in cost, community support, and flexibility. But paid platforms bring their own value: managed infrastructure, security, dedicated support, and the kind of continuous improvement that keeps pace with a fast-moving industry.
"Just be very open-minded and be clear in terms of your intention," he says. "That's my suggestion."
Momentum Energy is still in the early stages of exploring everything mabl has to offer. Firman is eager to push his team further into features like agentic test creation, Jira integration, performance and accessibility testing, and the MCP server — tools he believes can further accelerate the team's output. mabl's recently released quality metrics dashboard is also on his radar as a way to get a clearer picture of testing health across the organization.
For Firman, the through-line across all of it is the same philosophy that led him to mabl in the first place: use every tool for what it does best, stay curious about what's new, and never stop looking for ways to make quality everyone's responsibility.
Playwright is still part of the stack. It's just finally doing what Firman always hoped it would.
It’s the only SaaS solution that tightly integrates automated end-to-end testing into the entire development lifecycle.
mabl, the leading AI-native test automation platform, empowers software teams to accelerate innovation while ensuring exceptional quality. Our agentic tester complements your team’s human expertise with a digital teammate, providing comprehensive and reliable quality assurance across web, mobile, and APIs. Trusted by industry leaders like Workday, Vivid Seats, and JetBlue, mabl transforms how teams approach software quality.
