Automatic testing of web applications is bread and butter for any Quality Assurance specialist. But among so many testing suites available and various opinions about each of them, one can lose his bearings. We’ve come our way of trying a few end-to-end testing tools and we ultimately chose Cypress. But his article won’t be a paean to Cypress.io (although it might seem like one), neither will I be drawing any comparisons between it and any other testing suites. You can find lots of such content in the Web.
But over the course of this brief article, I’d like to show you why we even started seeking a new automatic testing suite, how Cypress eventually worked out, and why we find it the best fit to our QA team at Monterail.
Intrigued whether we’ve found the Holy Grail of the end-to-end testing tool? Let’s dive deeper into our real life case and see yourself.
The first pick—Nightwatch.js
Before we get to how and why we selected Cypress, we’ll start out by going over some relevant information about the aforementioned case study. The Web app I’m writing about is based on Vue.js (yep, JavaScript again!) + a mock server, and has been in development for over twelve months now. The first automatic testing framework that we decided to use for the project was Nightwatch.js and reached a test coverage level of around thirty percent, covering very basic features, including logging in, navigating between views, and filling out basic forms.
When the app’s development was advanced enough that we began thinking the next release, our client (working in the network security industry) started asking questions about the stability and security of the application with increasing frequency.
It became clear that a 30% test coverage was not a satisfactory outcome for any involved party.
The problem was that we’ve hit a wall with Nightwatch-based testing. To give an example, the Selenium Web Driver was very issue-prone, we’ve had problems with test stability, and we were rather dissatisfied with the pace of writing new tests. It quickly became apparent to us that if we were to boost our test coverage to include most of the features, we would have to find an alternative testing suite. And a good one at that.
#qa #cypress.io #development #nightwatch.js #javascript
