The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

Astronomical research increasingly depends on complex web-based user interfaces for data exploration, pipeline configuration, and visual inspection of results for quality assurance. As these interfaces grow in sophistication and user expectations rise, ensuring their reliability and usability across diverse environments becomes a critical challenge.
At Data Central we integrate automated UI testing into the development lifecycle of astronomical software tools, with a focus on both internal researcher-facing tools and web platforms. We explored, compared the use of frameworks such as Playwright and Selenium for end-to-end (E2E) testing, and how they can be integrated with CI/CD pipelines to catch regressions early and ensure consistent behaviour across browsers and platforms.
By sharing our experience, methods and tooling, we aim to encourage the broader astronomical software community to adopt automated UI testing as a standard practice, ultimately improving the reliability, maintainability, and user trust in research-critical applications.