This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 8th 2024)
We live without a doubt in a digital era, where everything is now taking place online. From shopping, entertainment, and information to self development, studies in general, and a way of living. As our world moves into this era, testing of these digital products is indeed a need that is sometimes overlooked by the client... but that is why we as IT professionals must emphasize and create awareness.
Testing is a crucial part of the software development lifecycle. It involves not only proving that something is working fine now, it is an action that we can do many times accidentaly and as we work more and more on that project. We have to be reviewing constantly. Luckily, with some tools we can now do as much as needed by creating automated tests.
But what should we be testing?
Everything! I know, time is precious, but clients are too. We have to think about a project like it is someone else's baby. They have something in mind and the team delivers it. For starters, when it is the testers' time to work on that project, we carefully inspect all the product. We have to act like a regular user by browsing the page following primarily the main workflows and when they are done, we start writing a document with the procedure of testing a functionality, then, is coding time baby!
Automated testing with cypress: coding time!
Although testers must not per se know any coding language, it is helpful to have a notion of JavaScript (because cypress is a frontend web automation tool) which will help us improve our coding with some logic for testing more complex functionalities. For most test you only use commands from cypress for selecting items and performing actions, but sometimes you will need to add some logic for your test to be more reusable and reliable. If you are new to cypress, check out variables, loops, and functions on JS. Gain a basic knowledge on these topics, and you are set to code test on cypress!
Tip: Something new to me while coding on cypress:
Cypress never stops surprising me. Something that I found very interesting while creating some code is that cypress cannot natively open a new tab or window that usually opens when browsing a webpage. So here is a simple solution for this problem. You can stub the process with this simple function, and it will still do all the process needed on that second page, but you will be kept on the main page. Then, if all is good with the action, your test will succeed
cy.window().then((win) => {
cy.stub(win, 'open').callsFake((url) => {
win.location.href = url;
}).as('windowOpen');
});Useful links:
Here you'll find endless information provided from cypress platform, and you can always check forums when you have a specific question and need some clarity on a topic:
This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 8th 2024)
This article is part of the CakeDC Advent Calendar 2024 (December 12th 2024)
