In this blog, you’ll read and learn about Cypress UI Testing, UI automation, and a brief Test Pyramid with Cypress and what they have to offer you. Before that, we’ll get some of the basics correct.
What is Cypress UI Testing?
Cypress is a budding open-source tech designed especially for developers and QA professionals. It’s a framework to aid the web-based user interfaces (UI Testing), test automation, E2E Testing, Integration and Unit Testing, Regression suites, and more.
Well, it’s known for its ability to write tests in real-time and real quick as one develops their web app or software. You can often find professionals and experts comparing it with another famous tool, Selenium. Although they both differ in several ways, and you’ll also know a few here. Without any delay, let’s keep reading it.
What are the key features of Cypress?
- Time Travel: It captures the pictures of your test as you run and them.
- Debugging: It becomes easy to debug with readable errors and stack traces.
- Automatic waiting: It waits for commands and assertions and doesn’t make a move until given one.
- Spies, stubs, and clocks: You can check and control the behavior of functions, server responses, or even timers.
- Screenshots and videos: You can see the screenshots that are automatically taken if any failure and videos of the whole test suite when run from a CLI.
- Cross-browser Testing: You can locally execute tests within Firefox and Chrome family browsers.
Also, watch and listen to an expert from the Cypress community: Getting Started Using Cypress.
Cypress UI Testing automation:
In recent days, most web applications are inspired by a JavaScript Framework that involves font and backend development. This mandates a strong QA Automation framework that seamlessly covers the APIs, E2E, and UI tests. These different tests will ensure a smooth user flow of a web app or software and validate if all the requirements are met.
Here a full-fledged QA test is crucial in maintaining the APIs and UI so that the best product quality is well-reserved to satisfy the consumer needs. And to test UI and APIs separately, developers and testers use different frameworks and tools. Some famous ones are, Rest-Assured, Nightwatch, Katalon Studio, Selenium, Postman, Cypress, and more. But for now, we’ll only focus on Cypress.
The UI and end-to-end testing in many development teams are not entirely given enough importance, just clearing the air. Even though UI automation testing is viewed as promising, it still has its own complexities, like it’s time-consuming, and your investment can go astray as it isn’t robust.
Here Cypress UI automation or Cypress tool, in general, solves a great number of problems in the UI. So, the developers can get to the core of the matter. You can find the Cypress to take off well with its earned reputation of UI Testing. And you can also be on the side of taking great benefit out of the tool too. Cypress is best recommended for UI and E2E testing if you can do without legacy browsers.
Why Use Cypress UI Testing Tool Over Other Automation Frameworks?
Cypress is an all-in-one testing framework and a JavaScript Test Automation tool for modern web applications. The tool offers a chai assertion library that consists of mocking and stubbing without the tool Selenium. Plus, this also supports the Mocha Test Framework, which can be deployed to build automation in web tests.
UI Testing over end-to-end testing
When you sit and begin to write the first Cypress Tests, you need to determine what should be tested. The crucial part is to decide if you want the UI or the entire system E2E to be tested. Keeping that aside a standard test pyramid would actually consider these 2 tests as coexisting.
It’s natural and normal to employ a few business-critical end-to-end tests and various user interface or UI tests separated from the backend services. Looking at the below image of a Cypress Tree, you can find more room given to many unit, UI, and integration tests while there are only a few end-to-end tests. Why is that? Why is it not that more end-to-end is not referred to perform against the whole system?
A development team would know it better when it comes to the painful experience of it. The end-to-end tests are slow, can get unstable as it relies more on the data storage of the backends. And due to the dynamic nature of data, it becomes a challenging environment to automate testing.
The data keeps changing while synchronizing from external systems, manual user interaction, and these changes are made available to users. And to respond to this in the test code, some waiting and repetition mechanisms are established.
Therefore, it all raises tension in the team. Thus the end-to-end test provides any generalized results; they often fail and cause disturbances in the development process. That doesn’t nullify that E2E Tests are essential for critical functionality, given that they cost a high price.
On the other hand, we have the UI tests. Now, the backend requests here are challenged by controllable data and perfectly suits to test every functionality in detail. Another plus point is that they can be developed as test-driven with the UI, which is one little investment in a well-tested codebase.
Conclusion…
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P.S There is an industry workshop on Cypress happening on the 2nd of September, 2021. Want to learn the expert’s secrets on writing the best Cypress Test? Then join us here.
