August 2019 Summaries

Tomasz Łakomy, a Senior Frontend Engineer at OLX Group, discusses the challenges and importance of implementing reliable automated testing in software development, emphasizing how Cypress.io transformed their testing process. He reflects on the stress developers face when releasing code, particularly on Fridays, due to the risk of production incidents and the potential negative impact on users. Łakomy highlights the limitations of previous testing tools, which often produced inconsistent results and were difficult to debug, advocating for Cypress.io as a solution due to its user-friendly interface, fast execution, and robust debugging capabilities. By utilizing Cypress.io, OLX Group has improved their testing workflow, gained confidence in code releases, and achieved a healthier work-life balance, ultimately leading to fewer production issues and a better night's sleep for developers.

Spotahome's engineering team, in collaboration with the Cypress team, hosted a live webcast to discuss their approach to achieving engineering excellence through a test-first culture using Cypress. The presentation, led by Spotahome's QA Automation Engineer David Zambrana and Front-End Engineer Borja Guzman, along with Cypress's VP of Marketing Steven Yi, highlighted the importance of organizing into small agile teams and incorporating testing as a core aspect of their workflow. The team shared insights into running over 100 tests weekly using Cypress and engaged with the audience through live questions and polls. The webcast was well-received, with attendees providing valuable feedback through a post-webcast survey, and the Cypress team encouraged viewers to stay connected for future broadcasts.

Gatsby is a free and open-source framework based on React that focuses on building fast and accessible websites and apps, and to ensure efficient testing, the Gatsby team uses Cypress for end-to-end (E2E) testing. An upcoming webcast, scheduled for September 4th, will feature Amir Rustamzadeh from Cypress.io and Dustin Schau from Gatsby, who will discuss how Gatsby employs Cypress to enhance their acceptance of open-source contributions. The session will include live coding of tests from scratch to CI and will cover topics such as writing Cypress tests for Gatsby React components, running tests in CircleCI, and optimizing workflows using the Cypress Dashboard and its GitHub Integration. The webcast will be livestreamed on YouTube, and a recording will be sent to all registrants who cannot attend live.

Stefano Magni, a front-end developer and advocate for testing and automation, explores the intricacies of asynchronous UI testing in his blog post. He emphasizes the challenges of using fixed sleep times in end-to-end (E2E) tests due to the variability in UI update speeds caused by factors like network state and resource availability. Magni advocates for adaptive waiting strategies that enhance test reliability and efficiency by allowing the UI to update just enough without unnecessary delays. He categorizes waiting types into page load, content, XHR requests, and custom waitings, providing examples of how various testing tools like Cypress, Puppeteer, Selenium, and TestCafé handle these. Magni highlights the importance of using these tools' built-in solutions or plugins for managing asynchronous processes while acknowledging the complexities involved, particularly for custom waitings.

The webcast titled "From Zero to Hero with Cypress" featured a presentation by Slido's QA Lead Filip Hric and Head of Engineering Lubo Drobny, alongside Cypress's VP of Marketing Steven Yi, discussing Slido's successful integration of Cypress into their testing processes despite having no initial JavaScript experience. The session covered Slido's team structuring, their journey towards quality assurance and test automation, and how they utilize Cypress for testing outbound emails with Mailosaur and automating test runs via Slack. The event included live participation through Zoom, YouTube Live, and Slido, with attendees contributing questions and feedback, which was highly appreciated by the organizers. Viewers who participated in the webcast and completed the post-event survey could expect a surprise in their mailbox, and the Cypress team encouraged followers on Twitter to stay informed about future broadcasts.

Pixelcabin, a company specializing in solving complex problems for a diverse range of Shopify merchants, has effectively utilized Cypress and TravisCI to enhance their automated test integration suite for Shopify themes. Co-Founder Michael Shannon showcased this approach at Shopify Unite, highlighting how adopting Cypress allowed Pixelcabin to improve test coverage and deploy updates more frequently and reliably. By integrating TravisCI, they were able to automate their testing process within a continuous integration environment, facilitating smoother and more efficient deployments. Shannon has also shared a repository alongside his talk, enabling others to learn how to configure Cypress and TravisCI for their own integration testing needs on Shopify.

In a recent webcast, Cypress's VP of Engineering, Gleb Bahmutov, and Head of Developer Experience, Amir Rustamzadeh, demonstrated how to generate code coverage reports using Cypress tests. They discussed the effectiveness of full end-to-end (E2E) tests in validating all levels of an application and how unit tests can enhance coverage by reaching code paths that E2E tests might miss. The webcast highlighted the use of a Cypress plugin that merges server-side coverage with front-end information to produce comprehensive coverage reports. The event featured interactive participation through live questions and was well-received, with viewers providing valuable feedback via a post-webcast survey. The recording, slides, and an example repository are available for those who missed the live presentation. Cypress announced more upcoming webcasts, including a session with Spotahome, and encouraged followers to stay updated via their Twitter account.

In this guest post, Justin James outlines the process of integrating Cypress UI tests into a DevOps pipeline for an Angular application using Travis CI. He explains how to automate UI tests to improve build quality and expedite the release process. The guide includes detailed steps for setting up a build environment, adding necessary npm dependencies, and configuring Travis CI to run tests automatically upon code changes. It highlights the use of npm packages like start-server-and-test and angular-http-server to manage the build and testing processes in a headless mode. Additionally, James discusses caching strategies for dependencies and setting up a .travis.yml file to automate the linting, building, and testing of the application. The article emphasizes the importance of automated testing in maintaining a deployable state and increasing confidence in production releases.

Spotahome, a leading online home booking service in Europe, is addressing the challenges of maintaining a high-quality user experience and coordinating its geographically dispersed and expanding engineering team by embedding a test-first culture using Cypress. This initiative involves organizing into small agile teams and conducting over 100 test runs weekly to ensure engineering excellence as the team prepares to double its current size of over 60 engineers. The company's approach and utilization of Cypress will be discussed in a live webcast on August 13th, 2019, where participants can engage in a Q&A session and receive a recording if unable to attend live.