July 2019 Summaries

Slido, a platform widely used for engaging participants in live and online events, has powered over 244,000 events and collected 7.1 million questions, serving prominent clients like Spotify, Lufthansa, and the BBC. To ensure seamless interactions and continuous innovation, Slido's QA team turned to Cypress for test automation, despite initially having no JavaScript experience. This transition enabled them to author over 600 end-to-end tests integrated into their CI processes, conduct visual regression testing, and even test outbound emails, with notifications via Slack. A webcast scheduled for August 7th will delve into Slido's team structure, their journey towards quality and test automation, and the lessons learned along the way, with a recording available for those unable to attend live.

Cypress has introduced a GitHub integration for its Dashboard, designed to enhance the developer experience by providing seamless integration of Cypress test runs with GitHub workflows. This integration is made possible through a GitHub App that offers configurable features such as commit status checks and pull-request comments. The app allows developers to receive status updates on their test runs directly within GitHub, providing insights into whether a commit meets the necessary conditions before merging. In cases of test failures, detailed information and links to the Cypress Dashboard are provided to help developers quickly resolve issues by analyzing error messages, screenshots, and videos. This integration is available to all Cypress Dashboard users, with documentation available for setup and usage to improve development workflows.

The blog post, originally by Juri Strumpflohner, explores the evolving landscape of automated testing in software development, particularly focusing on the shift from traditional testing methods like the "testing pyramid" to newer approaches such as Kent C. Dodds' "testing trophy." The post highlights the importance of balancing cost and benefit in testing, emphasizing that automated tests offer a better return on investment compared to manual tests. It introduces Cypress, a modern tool for end-to-end and UI testing, as a superior alternative to older tools like Selenium, due to its user-friendly API, advanced debugging features, and ability to run inside the browser, which provides enhanced access and control. Strumpflohner notes how Cypress effectively addresses common issues such as flaky tests and false negatives, making it a valuable addition to the web developer's toolkit.

The Cypress 3.4 release introduces several enhancements, including a unified login experience between the Test Runner and Dashboard, allowing users to login via Google accounts in addition to the existing GitHub option. This update utilizes the default system browser for login and follows a recent addition of Single Sign-On (SSO) support, which enables users to login using organization-specific identity protocols such as Windows or Azure Active Directory, G Suite, OpenID Connect, SAML 2.0, and Okta. These improvements facilitate easier access to the Cypress Dashboard, enabling teams to enhance their testing processes through features like parallelization, improved debugging, and detailed pipeline introspection.

Join Gleb Bahmutov, VP of Engineering, and Amir Rustamzadeh, Sr. Engineer at Cypress, for a webcast on July 31st exploring how to achieve complete code coverage using Cypress end-to-end (E2E) tests. The session will guide participants on instrumenting web application source code to generate coverage reports, discuss the effectiveness of E2E tests in validating application levels, and demonstrate leveraging unit tests to increase coverage of unreachable code paths. A demo showcasing a Cypress plugin that merges server-side and front-end coverage into a comprehensive report will also be featured. The webcast will include a live Q&A session and will be streamed on YouTube, with a recording available for all registrants.

Visual testing with Cypress, as discussed by Jesse Sanders, offers a modern approach to software testing by allowing developers to efficiently perform end-to-end tests, particularly for complex visual elements. Cypress, a powerful tool with a user-friendly interface, enables developers to debug tests and manage UI states, overcoming traditional challenges in testing edge cases. While Cypress does not inherently support visual testing, plugins like cypress-visual-regression and tools like Percy.io extend its capabilities. The cypress-visual-regression plugin allows for manual image comparisons during test runs, while Percy.io offers an advanced, cloud-based solution that integrates seamlessly with Cypress to automate the visual testing process. Percy.io enhances testing workflows by providing features such as automatic snapshot comparisons, workflow approvals, and GitHub integration, ensuring visual changes are scrutinized before code merges. Together, Cypress and Percy.io empower developers to maintain high code quality and prevent unnoticed UI alterations, making them valuable additions to any testing strategy.

Gleb Bahmutov's blog post discusses the testing of the first built-in browser module, KV Storage, using Cypress, following its introduction in Chrome version 74+. KV Storage is designed to modernize data storage by abstracting IndexedDB and reducing reliance on localStorage. The blog outlines a series of Cypress tests to verify the functionality of a demo web application that utilizes KV Storage, emphasizing the need to enable experimental web platform features in Chrome and the challenges associated with testing such experimental features. The post also highlights the use of custom Cypress commands to simplify testing and the importance of setting and resetting IndexedDB values correctly across tests. Bahmutov concludes that the TC39 proposal for a JavaScript standard library could lead to more efficient web applications and more effective developer testing through automation support, which would enhance the overall user experience.