FlowTrace

1. The Situation

Large enterprise applications (Oracle Fusion ERP, SAP) regenerate DOM element IDs across sessions and break brittle E2E tests on quarterly vendor patches. Manual regression verification costs ~20 minutes per business flow.

2. The Constraint & Tension

Enterprise ERP systems regenerate DOM element IDs across sessions and quarterly patches (`#btn-submit-8942` → `#btn-submit-3180`). Standard test runners break immediately or report false greens without validating that the business operation succeeded.

3. The Architecture Decision

Built a two-tier verification engine combining Chrome MV3 telemetry with a headless Node.js Playwright daemon. Designed a 4-step self-healing fallback (ARIA accessibility tree → contextual parent attributes → action text) with state mutation assertions (verifying modal dismissals and network responses before confirming step execution).

4. System Architecture

5. Verbatim Code Evidence

// The recorder and replayer share no code and never run together.
// The recording file is the entire contract between them.

// vendor-injected.mjs — extract Playwright's injected script from the shipped
// playwright-core bundle and vendor it as a pinned build artifact.

6. Trade-offs & What's Left

Extracting Playwright's internal selector generator requires marker-based string extraction of bundled source during build, which requires pinned dependencies and strict CI validation against Playwright upgrades.