Tips for Running End to End Testing for Web Frameworks
Application testing has been a part of the software development life cycle since the beginning. Starting with manual testing, the testing phase of the software development life cycle has now been fully automated. This means that we have tools that can help us test our applications from the frontend to the backend.
This is why this type of testing is known as End to End testing. End to End testing of an application means to test the UI and its components and make sure that they are in place, checking the functional components of the frontend frameworks, like Angular and React.
Finally making sure that the backend API is returning the response it was supposed to return. This could be any backend framework, including Node.js, and Python’s Django and Flask frameworks.
These tests are performed in an expectation versus result manner. The automation testers, when they write the code for an end to end test, define an expectation against a task in the test. When the test is executed, its sole job is to check if the actual result of that task matches the expectation defined earlier.
If it does match, the test is considered passed and if not, the test fails and the developer is shown where and what has caused the test to fail. End to End testing enables the development team to identify and resolve problems in their code efficiently as it takes less than a minute to not only show the results of the test but to also point out what has gone wrong and where.
The above diagram shows an end to end testing life cycle. The testing team is required to plan the tests as in any software testing life cycle, which includes identifying critical tasks, scheduling, and resource assignment. Designing a test is the process of writing the test cases, their specifications, usage, and risk analysis and finally, scheduling those tests.
Then the test execution phase is triggered, executing the tests written in the earlier stage. In the final part of the cycle, the results of the test are analyzed on the basis of expectations.
As an example, we can take a banking application. A user of a bank is given an application to conduct day to day transactions. For making a transaction, these are the steps they’re required to follow:
- Log in to the system
- Check if they have enough balance to transfer
- Make a transaction from their account to another if enough balance exists
- Check transfer details and remaining amount after the transaction
- Logout
These are the steps followed by every digital banking user on everyday basis and this is the most used process of any digital banking app. The development team would like to make sure that this process is performed seamlessly and doesn’t fail at any point due to a bug.
To make sure of that, the team decides to develop an end to end test for this process. For that, they need to build conditions based on the User Function. For each function, the team is required to include timing, sequence, and data conditions in the set of conditions they are supposed to build.
For example, in this case for the login page, the team has to check the username and password combination provided for the login for both correct and incorrect scenarios. Then there are password strength and appropriate error messages to be checked. The results of these scenarios will let the developer know if there are any bugs in the code.
End to End testing is usually performed at the time of branch merging or release. Because it’s a costly process with respect to both system resources and time, teams avoid executing it at every commit. If any test fails during the process of merging/release, the process fails completely with an error message.
There are many known tools for end to end testing of an application like Cypress, Puppeteer, Selenium, and TestCraft. Some of these require to write code and some don’t. TestCraft is widely known for a codeless end to end testing processes, which also provides a user-friendly environment with great analytical tools for the resulting data.
It requires no coding at all, enabling any novice or newcomer to get started with and deploy working end to end tests. It uses a drag and drop user interface pattern for constructing tests and AI-based auto-fixes for tests.
TestCraft allows developers to use and create custom test scenarios using the built-in drag and drop functionality of elements. It produces a model for each flow instead of testing, allowing the developers to execute the same flow with the different datasets and be able to make in-application edits.
TestCraft is based on Selenium, where Selenium is a code-based environment, and TestCraft writes all the code for you. All you have to use it drag and drop elements and make a testing flow for your application. It also uses Smart Binding with the help of Artificial Intelligence. The unique machine learning algorithm used in TestCraft undergoes a distinct approach to the Selenium Locators.
This enables TestCraft to fix 97.4% of the changes automatically, in the app, reducing maintenance time and computing resources. For fixing the broken tests, the process is extremely easy. Just click the correct elements and they will be rebound during the runtime.
The test will resume for the point where you just clicked. This will keep automation maintenance costs to a minimum.
There are many other great features provided by TestCraft, such as Reporting a bug produced during a run including screenshots and videos indicating what needs to be fixed, as well as notifications on your preferred messaging platform as well including slack and emails.
For any commercial release of any application, end to end testing plays an essential part. No team can release software without testing it throughout. In most organizations, it is still performed manually while we have tools like TestCraft at hand.
Organizations should focus on automating the end to end testing process using these latest tools to reduce time and effort so it could be utilized somewhere else, which will directly affect the revenues of the organization.
