An industry that purely relies on the customer is eCommerce. Regardless of cost or attractive offers, what customers seek is satisfaction, trust, and convenience. Not every eCommerce site we come across is flawless or exceptional; every site has its flaws. The more the magnitude of the flaw, the more losses are expected to occur – perhaps a few hundred dollars or even millions. The one and only way to eradicate such flaws before it reaches the customer is extensive round of quality assurance. Testing an eCommerce site before a release and periodically after release is rather important in providing a better user experience. eCommerce platforms nowadays come with out-of-the-box Testing Automation tools that ease the work of the testing team.
This blog summarizes the types of testing available in Magento 2.
Types of Test Automation in Magento 2
Functional Tests
Functional tests primarily verify whether a feature of the product is providing the same output as expected/required by the user. It is usually designed keeping the end user’s perspective in mind. Ideally, functional testing is employed by comparing every feature or function of the product with the business of end-user requirements. Besides, Functional tests also check the logical errands in a feature.
Magento 2 uses Functional Testing Framework (FTF) to run functional tests and those can be found here <magento2 root dir>/dev/tests/functional/. You could use PHPUnit, Selenium Standalone Server, or a simple web browser to run FTF tests.
Functional testing also includes testing techniques such as Smoke, user-acceptance, black-box and white-box testing.
Performance Tests
Performance testing is a critical step in the user experience, a single second delay in the performance can affect a the business in a large way. Performance testing checks for Reliability, Reproducibility, and Consistency in the Magento site. See dev/tests/performance to know more about the test runs and suites.
Integration Tests
Integration tests pinpoint any potential issues/bugs occurred during the interactions between components, layers, and the environment. It checks how different parameters of the whole system interact with each other. The goals of Integration tests include:
- Testing whether any external codes (from extensions, plugins, etc.,) are running properly in unison with the store environment;
- Testing the store’s functionality considering it as a single entity;
- Implementing the critical path method to the store; and
- Covering the interaction between the store components.
See dev/tests/integration to get hold of test runs and other information.
JavaScript Tests
JavaScript is a scripting language that can be used with HTML to produce dynamic effects and interactions on web pages. It started small, but has grown into large-scale libraries such as Jasmine, Angular.js, and Mocha. , See dev/tests/js to more about javaScript.
Static Code Analysis Test
As the name implies, this type of tests is run to verify the conformity of the code to the coding standards such as PSR-1, etc. Instead of running the code, Static Code Analysis tests analyze the codes. Whenever anti-patterns or bad codes are found, test cases are merged into static tests thus the problems could be addressed and eliminated.
Static Integrity Tests
Static integrity tests can be found in dev/tests/static/testsuite/Magento/Test/Integrity. This is similar to Static Code Analysis tests do not run the code but check the correctness of the di.xml file against the code. In addition to the existing analysis, static Integrity tests examines how the application is linked to one another.
Unit Tests
Unit tests are very much alike to Integration tests and Functional tests. They are used to find bugs/defects that aren’t abiding by the logic. Because they are designed to test individual classes or functions, identifying the cause of the problem is comparatively easier and less time-consuming. However, the main disadvantage of using this type of method is the necessity to write complex coupled codes. Regardless of the string attached, unit tests are one of the simpler methods to employ.
You could find more details at dev/tests/unit.
Final Word
The main reason Magento released Magento 2 is to ease up the process for the developers by shipping the build ready for extensions. The actual perks anticipated was that developers don’t ever have to tweak the core shipped files, but it stayed as anticipation and nothing more. The reason is that more and more stores started to customize Magento for their needs and a plethora of extensions changed the ecosystem completely. Readily available and low-cost extensions refrained developers from seeking for more-complex, code-altering workarounds.
With increasing local customization’s and extensions the need for testing, especially Functional and Unit testing, are rather important and mandatory in getting a store successfully up and running.
Hope this blog turned out to be useful for a bunch of Nerdy Testers. Also to those who are striving hard to manage a ton of test cases and test runs, try QA Touch – a smart test case management tool developed by the Testers, for the Testers.
