Engineer Builds Custom Transpiler to Migrate 4,000 Chatbot Tests to Playwright

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A software engineer at an unnamed company built a custom transpiler pipeline to migrate over 4,000 legacy QA tests to the Playwright framework after joining an internal team tasked with improving the QA pipeline. The existing test suite stored all test cases in a spreadsheet workbook using BDD-style keywords, which caused serious issues including binary file conflicts in Git, no tooling support, and difficulty debugging or running tests in parallel. A full LLM-based migration was ruled out due to token cost constraints and the need for determinism and traceability. Instead, the engineer designed a multi-stage transpiler pipeline in TypeScript — moving from workbook extraction through semantic analysis to code emission — completed within a self-imposed two-week deadline. Key libraries used included xlsx for reading the workbook and ts-morph for programmatically generating the output TypeScript test files.

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