Making a good impression on your customers is very important for your business. The best way to impress your customers is by making your product speak for you. Along with creating a good impression, your product also decides how much money you make. To make sure this happens, you need to test your product to confirm that it’s at its best.
It’s important that you test your product completely. You have to look at every nook and cranny of the product and make sure that there are no mistakes. Though this used to be a tedious process, it was an important one that can’t be compromised. With the advent of automation, automated testing came to the rescue.
In this blog post, I’ll be talking about the end-to-end testing frameworks enabled by automation. First, I will briefly explain what end-to-end testing is and how it’s done. Then I will talk about a few end-to-end testing frameworks and, finally, reveal my favorite framework.
What Is End-to-End Testing?
A product consists of multiple components and features. Each of these components has a purpose, and they all work differently. Before releasing your product to your customers, you need to make sure that all of these components and features work properly. This process of testing all the parts of your product for any issues is called end-to-end testing.
Let’s take an example everyone can easily relate to: an online shopping website. For a typical shopping website, the company would have processes for logging in/signing up, navigating through the products, placing an order, tracking an order, and contacting support. If you have a website like this, then you have to make sure that all of these processes work fine. You can’t miss out on an issue in any part of the product because that would affect the user experience. End-to-end testing is when you examine and test all these components and make sure they work as expected individually, and also in collaboration with each other when integrated.
How Does End-to-End Testing Work?
Well, it isn’t possible to predict every possible action of your users. But you at least have an idea of what kind of actions your customers might perform on your product. End-to-end testing uses test cases to test the product. Test cases are basically a collection of possible actions that can be performed on your product. These test cases are run on the product and the behavior of the product is observed. If your product is buggy, then you know it and you can work on fixing it.
There are two main categories when it comes to end to end testing:
- Horizontal Testing
- Vertical Testing
Horizontal Testing
This is where you test the product across all the components and features. In our example earlier, you would test the login/sign up page, navigation page, purchase page, etc., in horizontal testing. Horizontal testing covers the breadth of the application.
Vertical Testing
Vertical testing takes a different approach than that of horizontal testing. If you consider the same example mentioned earlier, each of the components has a complete process for them. For example, a login/sign up process can have direct logging in by entering the user’s information, logging in using Google or Facebook, or validating an email and choosing a password. Vertical testing focuses on the depth of each of the components a product consists of.
Now that you have a fair idea about end-to-end testing, let’s look at some of the frameworks used for end-to-end testing.
End-to-End Testing Frameworks
Selenium
I’m going to start with one of the most popular frameworks: Selenium. Selenium is one of the oldest in the business and has maintained its popularity throughout time. It is an umbrella of tools and packages and is mostly known to be used by various programming languages.
Selenium provides packages for various programming languages such as Java, Python, C#, Ruby, Javascript, etc. This helps developers across the developing community because it allows people to test their products in the language that they’re most comfortable with.
Selenium has a wide range of functions that help you simulate almost every action that a user would perform. This helps in the coverage of test cases. Selenium is open source and its IDE provides a record and playback testing feature. Selenium consumes fewer resources, allows parallel execution, and is integrable with other frameworks.
Cypress
Cypress is another framework that has made the life of testers easy. It reduces the problems faced while using Selenium by using a different architecture than that of Selenium. While Selenium can be used in unit testing and end-to-end testing, Cypress focuses only on end-to-end testing.
Cypress is versatile and effectively works on applications built using different frameworks such as React, Angular, etc. It doesn’t use any driver or remote code; the tests conducted using Cypress run in Javascript in a web browser. If you’re using Cypress, you will find writing and running tests and debugging very easy.
If you like or are into test-driven development, then Cypress will be very helpful for you because it is built to support TDD. You can develop your application faster because even when the tests are happening, you can make changes and see the changes taking place in real time.
Cucumber
Unlike Cypress, Cucumber focuses on behavior-driven development (BDD). This allows you to build a product by considering the perspective of different stakeholders like developers, QAs, customers, etc. The main reason for Cucumber’s popularity is its simplicity.
Cucumber uses Gherkin, which is very similar to writing statements in English. For people who don’t like writing tests in complex codes, Cucumber is the solution. Cucumber makes it easy even for a nontechnical person to write test scripts. This also helps nontechnical people who don’t understand core programming to understand the tests.
Cucumber supports different languages and is easy to set up. It focuses on end-user experience and is thus a good option for end-to-end testing.
Testim
Testim is one of the most sophisticated yet simple to use end-to-end testing frameworks. It caters to all kinds of testers. You like to write codes for your test? Testim lets you do that. Hate coding? No problem, you can carry on your testing without writing a single line of code.
Testim has a great record and playback testing feature, which uses complex algorithms and AI to run tests on an application. It gives you a very simple user interface with no compromise in the quality of testing. Testim is smart enough to test complex dynamic applications using its AI where a lot of other tools fail.
You will find multiple options to make your testing easy, such as validation, taking screenshots, feedbacks, etc. Testim provides parallel execution, webhooks, and integration with other frameworks to create the best environment for end-to-end testing.
Which Framework Should You Choose?
Well, every framework has its own pros and cons. You should choose the one with the most pros and the least cons for your project. If you ask me, that would probably be Testim. I’ve used many different testing frameworks and have faced few issues with each of them. But when it comes to Testim, it feels like the developers have considered all the possible problems that you could face and have provided a solution for it. The best way to know how good it is is to try it out. You can get a free account here.
