April 2021 Summaries

NeuraLegion’s VP, Oliver Moradov, discusses the integration of Cypress, NeuraLegion’s HAR Generator, and NexPloit to automate application security testing within software development pipelines. NeuraLegion offers an AI-powered Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) platform that focuses on enabling developers and QA teams to incorporate security testing using existing functional scripts and Cypress tests. By generating HAR files from Cypress tests, these can be used to conduct comprehensive security tests via NexPloit.app, which integrates seamlessly with CI/CD tools like GitHub Actions and CircleCI. The NexPloit platform automatically validates vulnerabilities without manual checks, providing real-time results and detailed remediation guidelines, thus enhancing security testing efficiency. This integration allows for rapid and streamlined security testing, aligning with the fast-paced release cycles and automation culture at NeuraLegion, and supports a developer-friendly approach to maintaining application and API security.

Cypress and Ansible showcased a live webcast detailing Ansible's complete overhaul of their UI testing strategy by adopting Cypress, which involved discarding all previous tests and starting anew. The discussion, led by Gleb Bahmutov from Cypress and John Hill from Ansible, highlighted the implementation and evolution of Cypress over two years, achieving significant improvements such as running the entire end-to-end suite in 14 minutes and reducing escaped bugs through the Cypress Dashboard. The webcast, which included an interactive Q&A session, received positive feedback from participants, and viewers were encouraged to stay connected for future broadcasts.

In a recent webcast, Gleb Bahmutov, a Distinguished Engineer at Cypress, and George Palfreyman, a Senior Quality Engineer at Pendo, discussed how Pendo's quality engineering team chose Cypress to enhance their testing suite and maintain a high standard of quality. They explained their decision to switch to Cypress, detailing how they integrated it within their organization, including encouraging developers to collaborate with quality engineers in writing tests. The webcast also delved into the technical steps taken to rebuild their test suite, highlighting features like Test Retries and Flaky Test Detection. The session was interactive, with participants asking questions via Slido, and those unanswered during the webcast were addressed later. Participants were thanked for their feedback, and viewers who completed a survey were promised a surprise, with the Cypress Team hinting at more future webcasts for those interested in staying informed through their Twitter updates.

Red Hat's Ansible Automation Platform underwent a complete UI rewrite, choosing React for their frontend and Cypress for testing after a two-week evaluation. The webcast, hosted by the Cypress Team, details how Ansible's team implemented Cypress, initially strategizing their testing to improve efficiency and reduce escaped bugs. Over two years, they managed to run their entire end-to-end suite faster than their unit test suite, significantly improving their development process. The webcast will also discuss Ansible's future plans, such as increasing test coverage and automating translation testing, with a concluding live Q&A session. Even those unable to attend the live session can register to receive a recording.

Cypress has launched the alpha version of its dedicated Component Test Runner, designed to replace node-based component tests by executing them in a real browser environment, which allows developers to debug with familiar tools. This new test runner supports popular libraries and bundlers like React, Vue, Webpack, Rollup, and Vite, and offers features such as fast startup, live reload, and in-browser debugging. Unlike the Cypress End-to-End (E2E) Test Runner, component testing requires less infrastructure, making it significantly faster. The Component Test Runner aims to address the challenges faced by developers with node-based test runners, such as mocking native browser functionalities and managing asynchronous DOM selections. With the support of a dedicated team and an active community, Cypress encourages developers to try the new runner and provide feedback to enhance its capabilities.

Cypress Component Test Runner, introduced with Cypress 7.0, integrates seamlessly with the Cypress Test Runner to provide a robust tool for component testing in Vue CLI projects, supporting both Vue 2 and Vue 3 with built-in TypeScript compatibility. The setup involves installing Cypress along with Webpack Dev Server and Vue adapters, configuring a plugins file to use the Webpack configuration, and specifying the location of test files via cypress.json. The test runner allows for real browser testing of components, offering a visual and interactive environment that mirrors user experiences, with hot reload functionality for immediate feedback. This approach leverages existing tools like Webpack and Vue Test Utils, facilitating incremental migration and uniting testing with design, thereby enhancing the testing process beyond traditional jsdom-based environments like Jest.

The introduction of the Cypress Component Test Runner in Cypress 7.0 allows developers to perform component testing in a real browser environment, enhancing the development and testing workflow for React applications. By integrating with tools like Webpack and leveraging the @cypress/react package, this feature enables developers to mount components similarly to how they would with Enzyme or Testing Library. The runner's visual feedback loop facilitates immediate insights and debugging, as changes in code lead to instant test re-runs and visual rendering updates, making it superior to jsdom-based environments like Jest. The tool, while still in alpha, promises to unify component testing and design, potentially replacing traditional test and design infrastructures such as Jest and Storybook. This seamless integration into existing setups allows for incremental adoption, offering a more intuitive and comprehensive approach to testing with visual confirmation of component behavior.

In a blog post by Gleb Bahmutov, a new trial feature called experimentalRunEvents is introduced for Cypress, allowing developers to run Node code before or after executing a spec file using event hooks that require operating system access. This feature is demonstrated through a tutorial that showcases a playful application of the after:spec hook, which re-encodes test spec videos to appear like old vintage movie reels as an April Fools' joke. The process involves utilizing the ffmpeg utility to adjust the video colors to a yellowish hue and overlaying scaled scratches, aided by additional tools like ffprobe for video resolution adjustments. The tutorial provides a detailed guide on configuring and enabling these experimental hooks, with a focus on how to create and combine vintage video effects, ultimately producing a nostalgic effect using Cypress's capabilities.