January 2020 Summaries

PlanGrid (Autodesk), a leading construction productivity software with over 1 million projects and 90,000 active weekly users, has achieved significant automation consistency across 20 development teams by utilizing Cypress tests. They conduct over 900 daily tests to ensure the availability and quality of their services worldwide. On February 12th, a live webcast will demonstrate PlanGrid's strategies for maintaining quality through Cypress tests within a microservice web frontend model, emphasizing the benefits of keeping test code adjacent to feature code. The session will also cover the use of an internal library for sharing custom Cypress commands, ensuring consistency across 20 repositories, and integrating shared functions with minimal overhead. Additionally, the webcast will explore PlanGrid’s customized Typescript Cypress library and its integration with tools like Create-React-App, internal API clients, and external services such as Launch Darkly and Datadog.

Cypress is aiming to build a world-class product team by leveraging its strong foundation in application testing, which has already gained significant developer praise and aligns with the company's vision and the open-source community ethos. With recent Series A funding, Cypress plans to expand its capabilities by hiring Product Managers and Designers who are collaborative, empowered, learning-oriented, empathetic, and delivery-focused. These new team members will partner with existing Engineering, Marketing, and Developer Experience teams to advance their products while embodying Cypress's core values of transparency, craftsmanship, and creating delight. The company seeks passionate, communicative, and perspective-driven individuals who thrive on adventure and are eager to contribute to a dynamic and innovative environment.

The Cypress Ambassador program is a community initiative designed to spread knowledge and promote best practices in testing with Cypress among developers and QA engineers. Ambassadors contribute by authoring blog posts, delivering webcasts, creating plugins, and sharing success stories through online testimonials. They also engage with the community by giving demos at meetups and leading workshops at conferences. The program offers participants benefits such as a free Sprout Plan, exclusive communication channels, promotional support, and special edition merchandise. As Cypress begins 2020, they encourage interested individuals to apply to join their network and contribute to their mission of building a connected and informed community.

In the blog post, Gleb Bahmutov provides a detailed guide on how to test the Browser Notification API using Cypress, focusing on a small web application that displays notification popups if the user permits them. The article explains the process of setting up tests in Cypress to verify various scenarios, such as checking if the browser supports notifications, handling permissions already granted or denied, and prompting the user for notification permissions. Bahmutov demonstrates writing and executing tests that simulate different conditions by manipulating the Notification API properties and using stubs and spies to verify the app's behavior without causing numerous popups during testing. The post emphasizes the importance of testing the web application code rather than the browser's implementation of the Notification API to ensure comprehensive coverage of the app's features.

In a blog post by Gleb Bahmutov, the challenges of assertion counting in automated testing using Cypress are explored, specifically focusing on scenarios where tests finish prematurely before all assertions are executed. The post illustrates this with an example of a web application that displays a confirmation prompt, showing how initial tests can pass incorrectly when using asynchronous operations like delayed pop-ups. Bahmutov discusses various techniques to ensure tests wait for all assertions, including using spies, local variables, promises, and the popular cypress-wait-until plugin. The post introduces the cypress-expect-n-assertions plugin, which allows users to declare the expected number of assertions, ensuring tests only finish when this count is met, thus preventing premature test completion and ensuring accurate test results.

Stefano Magni, a front-end engineer, advocates for using software tests as a documentation tool, emphasizing their role in ensuring code accuracy, preventing regressions, and providing clear user flow documentation. Magni shares his successful experience of transitioning a project to a new developer by utilizing a combination of UI tests with Cypress, integration tests with Jest, and Storybook stories to illustrate the architecture and functionality of a React-based back-office system. While noting some imperfections, such as suboptimal test descriptions and shared fixtures, he highlights the benefits of well-written tests, including reducing cognitive load, facilitating smooth project handovers, and eliminating dependency on historical memory. Despite some challenges, Magni underscores that tests can serve as both a practical documentation method and an effective testing strategy, inviting feedback from peers on their experiences.