Book Image

A Frontend Web Developer’s Guide to Testing

By : Eran Kinsbruner
3 (1)
Book Image

A Frontend Web Developer’s Guide to Testing

3 (1)
By: Eran Kinsbruner

Overview of this book

Testing web applications during a sprint poses a challenge for frontend web app developers, which can be overcome by harnessing the power of new, open source cross-browser test automation frameworks. This book will introduce you to a range of leading, powerful frameworks, such as Selenium, Cypress, Puppeteer, and Playwright, and serve as a guide to leveraging their test coverage capability. You’ll learn essential concepts of web testing and get an overview of the different web automation frameworks in order to integrate them into your frontend development workflow. Throughout the book, you'll explore the unique features of top open source test automation frameworks, as well as their trade-offs, and learn how to set up each of them to create tests that don't break with changes in the app. By the end of this book, you'll not only be able to choose the framework that best suits your project needs but also create your initial JavaScript-based test automation suite. This will enable fast feedback upon code changes and increase test automation reliability. As the open source market for these frameworks evolves, this guide will help you to continuously validate your project needs and adapt to the changes.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Frontend Web Testing Overview
7
Part 2 – Continuous Testing Strategy for Web Application Developers
11
Part 3 – Frontend JavaScript Web Test Automation Framework Guides

Understanding the Selenium framework and its components

As explained in Chapter 3, Top Web Test Automation Frameworks, the Selenium framework (available at https://www.selenium.dev/) consists of three core pillars – Selenium WebDriver, Selenium IDE, and Selenium Grid (you can read more about the pillars here: https://www.selenium.dev/documentation/grid/getting_started/). In this chapter, we will only focus on the WebDriver protocol with JavaScript language binding and Grid, and leave Selenium IDE for Chapter 13, Complementing Code-Based Testing With Low-Code Test Automation.

Selenium WebDriver

With the release of Selenium 4, the latest release at the time of writing, the framework became fully W3C-compliant (https://www.w3.org/TR/webdriver1/). The richness of the WebDriver protocol enables developers to drive any possible action on a web application, running on all types of browsers.

To get started with Selenium WebDriver, simply install the node package through the...