Company
Date Published
Author
Harita Ravindranath
Word count
2828
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

In this article, headless browser testing is explored as a viable option for improving test execution speed. Headless browsers are gaining popularity due to their ability to bypass the overhead of starting up a browser GUI, resulting in faster automation test execution and up to 15x enhanced performance. The advantages of headless browser testing include faster test execution, useful in CI pipelines, supporting multiple browser versions, and beneficial in multi-tasking and parallel testing. However, limitations such as debugging challenges and inability to detect cosmetic bugs are also present. Headless testing is suitable for scenarios where there is no need to render the visuals, such as web scraping and data extraction. Nightwatch.js is an open-source automated testing framework that supports end-to-end browser testing for web applications and websites. It provides a more lightweight and less resource-intensive way of automation testing with enhanced performance and quicker execution. To run tests in headless mode, the chromeOptions settings need to be added to the nightwatch.json configuration file, and the desired capabilities class needs to be passed to the LambdaTest Selenium Grid via the nightwatch.conf.js file. The test coverage can be extended by using a cloud-based remote grid solution provided by LambdaTest, which offers cross-browser testing across multiple platforms and browsers.