April 2022 Summaries

Traitanit Huangsri, a prominent Cypress Ambassador, has successfully built one of the largest Cypress communities in Thailand since first encountering the testing tool in 2018. With over 3,000 members, the community continues to grow, contributing to the increasing demand for Cypress skills in Thailand's software industry. Traitanit is motivated by a desire to support Thai engineers by sharing best practices for writing tests and solving testing problems, such as selecting elements and using Cypress effectively. Outside of his professional pursuits, he enjoys running and learning Korean due to his interest in the culture. The Cypress Ambassador program aims to support advocates like Traitanit by providing them with speaking opportunities and other resources, emphasizing their role in empowering others and fostering a vibrant community spirit.

The Cypress Team has introduced a new Branches page in the Cypress Dashboard, designed to enhance project management by highlighting the most relevant branches of a project. This feature, accessible from the left navigation after entering a project, shows default, active, and stale branches sorted by recent activity, with active branches being those with test runs in the last 30 days. Each branch displays the results of its last four test runs, marked with green or red icons to indicate pass or fail outcomes. This addition aims to improve branch-based workflows and provides users with high-level insights into branch health, contributing to more efficient and informed project management. Cypress Dashboard, which integrates seamlessly with CI pipelines, continues to offer users an intuitive and powerful experience, and feedback on this new feature is encouraged as part of ongoing improvements.

The Cypress Team introduced the cy.origin() command in Cypress 9.6.0, which simplifies multi-domain testing by allowing commands to be executed across different superdomains within a single test case. This feature addresses previous challenges with the same-origin policy that required awkward workarounds, such as splitting tests to bypass cross-origin errors. The cy.origin() command improves upon these limitations by enabling seamless testing of complex workflows like syndicated authentication without violating test isolation principles. Additionally, with the release of Cypress 12, cy.session() was moved to general availability, providing enhanced test performance by caching session data between tests, which reduces execution time and network load. The Cypress team is actively seeking user feedback on these features as they continue to refine the testing experience.

Christopher Baus, a Senior Engineer Manager at Cypress, reflects on his career transition from working with legacy server-side technologies to embracing dynamic client-side development and eventually joining Cypress. Initially finding his footing with JavaScript and React, Baus encountered challenges with unit testing in Vue, which led him to discover Cypress while exploring end-to-end (E2E) testing solutions. He was drawn to Cypress for its elegant approach, which contrasted with the cumbersome testing processes he previously experienced. After two years of managing teams using various testing tools, Baus was approached by Cypress and accepted a role to improve testing practices for engineers and their managers. Currently, he is excited to oversee the rollout of Cypress's Component Testing offering, which emphasizes component behavior over implementation, making refactoring more cost-effective and enhancing the efficiency of engineering teams. Baus values the opportunity to contribute to the evolution of automated testing and aims to share his insights to improve the testing experience for others.

Ramona Schwering, a Cypress Ambassador, is a self-identified introvert who actively participates in workshops and events, advocating for greater representation of women in the tech industry. Her motivation to be a Cypress Ambassador stems from her passion for community, having discovered Cypress at a conference and further engaging through hackathons, meetups, and open-source projects. Ramona supports others by sharing her knowledge through talks and articles, and by being a founding member of the German Cypress community, which offers a platform for learning and sharing experiences. She appreciates Cypress features that enhance the developer experience, particularly the time-traveling feature for debugging. Despite her introverted nature, she has achieved the professional milestone of becoming a comfortable public speaker. The Cypress Ambassador program, which supports and highlights top advocates like Ramona, provides speaking opportunities and resources to empower ambassadors and facilitate community engagement.

Juri Strumpflohner, a key figure in the Nx development community, explores the integration of Cypress for end-to-end testing within an Nx workspace, emphasizing the ease of setup and configuration Nx provides. He highlights how Nx automatically configures essential tools like TypeScript, Jest, ESLint, Prettier, and Cypress, simplifying the development process. The focus is on sharing custom Cypress commands across multiple applications within an Nx monorepo, utilizing the apps and libs folder structure for modular architecture. Strumpflohner demonstrates how to create a new Nx workspace, set up a React application, and generate a library to host reusable Cypress commands, facilitating their use across different tests. The article illustrates the process of adding custom commands and integrating them into tests, showcasing Nx's capability to create scalable and maintainable testing environments.

Filip Hric's journey from a psychology major to a Cypress Ambassador underscores his dedication to learning and teaching within the Cypress community. His initial curiosity about code testing led him to engage deeply with the Cypress ecosystem, eventually establishing himself as a trusted educator known for his workshops and community support. Filip's enthusiasm for Cypress is fueled by the platform's enjoyable and collaborative nature, enabling him to share his experiences and connect with both the Cypress team and its worldwide community. He actively supports others through a Discord server and educational workshops, with his professional achievements including having a course published on egghead.io. The Cypress Ambassador program, which highlights advocates like Filip, offers resources and opportunities for Ambassadors to connect and contribute, reflecting the program's commitment to celebrating community spirit and empowerment.

Cypress has launched new integrations for its Dashboard with GitHub and GitLab Enterprise, allowing Business and Enterprise plan customers to seamlessly connect on-premise versions of these popular source control platforms. This enhancement enables developers to automatically track and display Cypress test results directly within their preferred source control environments, providing comprehensive feedback with each code commit, pull request, or merge request. By embedding test results in source control, organizations can better manage their CI pipelines and reduce the risk of faulty code being merged into production. These integrations, which are self-service and quick to install, offer a familiar experience to users of Cypress's existing cloud-based integrations. Current customers are encouraged to explore these offerings to enhance their testing workflows, and those on other plans can contact Cypress for upgrade information.