End to End Testing Frameworks Introduction
By: Nayeem Reza
Tags: Software Development, Software Engineering, Programming, End To End Testing, Software Testing

Software testing is a fundamental part of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and any system we develop, we cannot ignore this part of the development pipeline.

Fig: Software Development Life Cycle

We can see both manual and automation testing in real-life projects. Manual testing is good for small systems but manually testing a large system is something unimaginable. That’s where test automation comes in, allowing us to run thousands of tests for millions of scenarios to check if the system is bug-free or not.

When we talk about automation testing, there are different types of testing we developer consider while developing a project e.g. Unit Tests, Integration Tests, End to End Tests, etc. Each of these is important for their own reason because they intend to solve a specific type of testing procedure.

What Is End to End Testing?

The diagram below can help us understand the whole testing paradigm and where end-to-end testing fits in the whole picture.

Unit tests are the small building blocks of the whole testing service, where we try to test functional units of the system e.g. different services or functions separately in a more isolated environment, not depending on any environment or other part of the system.

Integration tests are one level up and here we integrate different parts/units of the system together and test if they are being integrated properly and working smoothly. Having multiple units connected here makes the process slower than unit tests.

Fig: Test Automation Paradigm

And finally, end-to-end testing refers to the mechanism where we test the actual flow a user does in the system. Here, our testing client will be treated as a user and does everything e.g. interacting over the pieces, clicking buttons, scrolling pages, navigating around different URLs, etc.

The testing client works like a user, and after taking each step, it checks whether the output/behavior is okay in terms of user perspective. This process is the slowest among others and more end-to-end integrated over different parts of the system.

There exist different types of tools, frameworks to do end-to-end testing. Some of them are being used for ages e.g. Selenium but in recent times we have got some popular and dev-friendly tools in the ecosystem to serve our needs on test automation.

Let’s look into some of these tools/frameworks.

TestCraft

For a small company with limited resources, it is difficult to maintain an additional team for quality assurance and testing. TestCraft is the type of tool where we don’t need to write any code, and anyone can use its interface for creating a testing scenario for a specific flow.

This awesome codeless tool which is based on Selenium for running regression and continuous tests clearly breaks the software testing bottlenecks for small organizations. TestCraft also comes with AI-powered automation overcoming changes in the app which gives immense velocity to a team by saving time.

Fig: Example of Creating a testing flow

Anyone who doesn’t have coding skills can sign up on TestCraft and create tests by using their drag-and-drop interface and run them on different browsers and environments, simultaneously.

Maintaining these tests is easier via TestCraft because it creates dynamic test models that update automatically for reflecting the changes to the app.

Finally, integrating TestCraft with CI/CD pipeline is also very smooth and easy. It enables the teams to achieve continuous testing while pushing code to different test environments and production.

Fig: Example of scheduling a test execution through the CI/CD in TestCraft

Cypress

Cypress is an open-source modern web automation test framework to make the testing process easier and it’s more than just an end-to-end test automation tool. It can be used to interact with different front-end apps built with React.

Cypress comes with its own test-runner which is easier for debugging when a test fails. Here is a sample cypress test that you can check and when it runs it looks something like this.

As Cypress runs in the browser, it is easy for it to interact with the DOM and easily check the updates in real-time. It has built-in features like retries and polling which helps to test the modern data-heavy applications.

Installing Cypress in any environment is a piece of cake because it can be installed using NPM and no additional thing is required, and that’s the reason that integrating cypress in CI/CD pipeline is also very snappy!

Cypress has a very low barrier to entry, anyone can jump in and start writing tests.

Selenium Webdriver

Selenium is a classic tool for test automation, so many organizations still use this to do their test-automation. Selenium executes remotely, not like cypress which runs inside the browser, it sends all the underlying remote commands across the network to the webdriver.

By using Selenium we can write our tests in any language. We can integrate Selenium with our backend system and use the same operating system to execute the commands. The main feature that everyone loves about Selenium it, Its testing support across different browsers.

The standalone Selenium IDE is very good for developers to work with, also it has cross-browser support! This is useful for visual UI testing and also when we test the responsiveness of an application.

Finding visual bugs is easier when we run tests with the Visual Grid, by applying Applitools Root Cause Analysis feature. Also, the Selenium IDE runner can be integrated with CI/CD pipelines.

Fig: Example of Selenium IDE Control Flow

Selenium supports parallel test execution by Grid and which eventually helps us to save execution time and also it consumes fewer hardware resources. It is easier to add this to existing servers.

Conclusion

There are a lot of tools in the test-automation ecosystem, but it’s always up to the developers and managers to analyze the requirements of their system and which tool/framework is best suited for the team and the system itself.

If a team starts thinking about integrating automation testing, I would suggest trying codeless tools. This can help the team better understand how the whole automation testing fits in their development pipeline and decide based on that. Test automation can give the development team enough confidence before deploying something in production.