May 2020 Summaries

Optimizely's Progressive Delivery & Experimentation platform enhances software delivery and growth by leveraging Cypress for quality assurance across various platforms and third-party integrations. An upcoming webcast on June 10th will detail how Optimizely's QA team employs Cypress to confidently test and deploy new features, particularly focusing on feature flags. The session will cover when to automate tests for feature flags, when it's unnecessary, and how Cypress facilitates this process. The presentation will conclude by showcasing how the QA team has successfully reduced their untested code from 28% to 0% using Cypress. A recording will be available for those unable to attend the live event.

In a recent webcast, Gleb Bahmutov from Cypress.io and Henric Trotzig from Happo.io discussed integrating visual regression testing with Happo into the Cypress.io test suite to enhance both functional and visual quality in UI testing. The event, attended via Zoom and YouTube Live, covered crucial topics such as the fundamentals of screenshot and visual regression testing, the benefits of the Happo and Cypress integration, and how to efficiently test UI components across various browsers and screen sizes without impacting test performance. The webcast included a Q&A session, with responses to unanswered questions available on Slido, and garnered positive feedback through a post-event survey. Attendees were encouraged to stay informed about future broadcasts by following Cypress.io on Twitter.

In a blog post by Gleb Bahmutov, the author discusses optimizing test speed in Cypress by identifying where tests spend the most time. The focus is on measuring the duration of individual Cypress commands to pinpoint slow commands, such as cy.type and cy.click, which involve server communication and consequently take longer. Bahmutov demonstrates using events emitted by the Test Runner to capture command durations and suggests stubbing network calls to improve speed, though this doesn't always yield expected results. He explores the impact of keyboard events on typing commands and offers a solution by using blur events to equalize command durations. The post concludes with advice on using fixture files for focused testing and illustrates how to print test duration and command timings in the terminal during Cypress runs, ensuring both efficient and effective testing practices.

Cypress, a popular testing framework, has significantly enhanced its debugging capabilities since the introduction of test error code frames in version 4.6, allowing developers to address code issues more efficiently. By incorporating both component and end-to-end testing, Cypress enables early debugging in the development process, promoting agility and productivity. The framework emphasizes the readability and actionability of error messages, providing human-readable feedback, error stack traces, and direct links to source code lines in supported editors such as VS Code and WebStorm. This approach minimizes the time between error detection and resolution, thereby improving the overall developer experience. Additionally, Cypress supports configuring file openers for inline highlighting, ensuring a seamless debugging process, and underscores the importance of generating inline source maps for the most effective error message experience. Cypress is designed to integrate smoothly into modern app development, offering quick installation across various platforms and enhancing the testing and debugging workflow.

DHL's engineering team significantly improved their testing efficiency by using Cypress alongside Docker and Jenkins, as discussed in a webcast presented by Gleb Bahmutov and Rick Fleuren. By implementing full end-to-end test runs without the need for mocks or stubbing and utilizing Docker containers for parallelization, the team managed to cut their test execution time from seven minutes to three and a half minutes. The presentation, available for replay, attracted a lively audience who engaged with questions via Zoom, YouTube Live, and Slido, and the event organizers encouraged further interaction by promising future webcasts and updates on Twitter.

The Cypress Team announced a live webcast scheduled for May 20th, 2020, focusing on integrating Happo.io, a cross-platform, cross-browser screenshot testing tool, with Cypress test suites to enhance both functional and visual quality assurance in modern user interfaces. The hour-long session, which includes a live Q&A, aims to educate participants on the fundamentals of screenshot and visual regression testing, providing an overview and demonstration of the Happo and Cypress integration. The webcast will also explore techniques to use the Cypress test suite to automatically test UI components across various browsers and screen sizes without compromising test performance. Interested individuals are encouraged to register for the webcast even if they cannot attend the live session, as a recording will be provided to all registrants.

In early April 2020, a webcast featuring Gleb Bahmutov, VP of Engineering at Cypress, and Vinny Thanh, a CircleCI Solutions Engineer, demonstrated how to enhance end-to-end testing efficiency using the Cypress Orb with CircleCI. The session highlighted the benefits of CircleCI orbs, which simplify the process of writing CI configurations, and explained how to effectively set up Cypress on CircleCI to ensure reliable testing across different environments. Attendees participated actively, contributing live questions, and were encouraged to stay connected for future webcasts. The event also offered access to a recording and slides for those interested in further exploring the integration of CircleCI and Cypress for testing web applications.