Skip to main content

Automated browser testing in 2018

Every now and then I do some research on browser testing. More specifically I try to find and evaluate what kind of ready to use solutions or libraries have emerged since my previous research or if some of the previously tested solutions has come up with something new.

Back in September 2017 I had some extra time on my hands and I used a couple of days to see what are the new and interesting solutions at that time. I came across some tools that I have used in the past and found two new interesting options in which one stood out.

Say hello to TestCafe


The most interesting solution that I found was called TestCafe. It's a open source Node.js library from a company called Developer Express Inc. They also have a commercial product called TestCafe (confusing) which I haven't tried as the open source library provided everything I was interested in and it seemed to be under active development.

The thing that caught my interest at first was that this library doesn't depend on WebDriver i.e. the API used by Selenium. All the browser testing tools that use real browsers and I have tried before have been dependent on WebDriver API meaning that even if the tool itself is e.g. a Node.js library it still needed to run the WebDriver Java API in the background.

Another thing where TestCafe excels compared to it's rivals is it's browser support. Basically all major browsers and operating systems are supported.

Writing tests with TestCafe


As TestCafe is a Node.js library the tests can be written in JavaScript and the library also provides TypeScript support. I've written a example with three test cases that can be found from my github repository, the last one fails on purpose to demonstrate failure reporting.

TestCafe uses a concept called Selectors for selecting DOM elements to test or to execute a action on. In addition it provides a concept of client functions that adds the ability to read data from client side e.g. the current URL of the browser window.

Running tests


Given that TestCafe is a Node.js library the tests can be executed with node as simply as running command npm test. Another option is to execute the tests in a docker container which is a great option for CI servers. I have created examples and instructions of both in my github repository.

Real life experiences


I have been using TestCafe in a work project since November 2017 to run browser tests locally with Node.js and in CI within docker. So far I have been very impressed on how good the performance and stability have been compared to previously used solutions. I'm still going to keep my eyes open for old and new rivals but for now I consider TestCafe to be the solution that I'll be using and comparing others to.

Other solutions to consider


Commercial tool from the same company Developer Express Inc. also called TestCafe. I haven't tried this one so I can't really say anything about it.

Cypress.io is another new tool that runs without WebDriver. This one supports only Chromium based browsers and I couldn't get anything but their own examples to run so my experience with this one wasn't so great.

Popular posts from this blog

Sharing to help myself

It's been a while since my last post but I have a good excuse. I've been in a new customer project (well new for me) for two months now and have absorbed a lot of new information on the technology stack and the project itself. This time I'll be sharing a short post about sharing code and how it can help the one who's sharing the code. I'll be giving a real life example of how it happened to me. My story Back when I was implementing first version of my simple-todo REST-service I used Scala and Play framework for the service and specs2 for testing the implementation. Since then I've done a few other implementations of the service but I've continued to use specs2 as a testing framework. I wrote about my implementation and shared the post through various services and as a result someone forked my work and gave me some pointers on how I could improve my tests. That someone was Eric Torreborre  the man behind specs2 framework. I didn't take his ref

Simple code: Immutability

Immutability is a special thing that in my mind deserves a short explanation and praise. If you're familiar with functional programming you surely recognice the concept of immutability because it's a key ingredient of the paradigm. In the world of object oriented programming it's not as used and as easy to use approach but there are ways to incorporate immutability to parts of the code and I strongly suggest you to do so. Quick intro to immutablity The basic idea of immutability is unchangeable data.  Lets take a example. We have a need to modify a object's property but because the object is immutable we can't just change value but instead we make a copy of the object and while making the copy we provide the new value for the copy. In code it looks something like this. val pencil = Product(name = "Pencil", category = "Office supply") val blackMarker = pencil.copy(name = "Black marker") The same idea can be applied in functions and metho

Simple code: Naming things

There are two hard things in programming and naming is one them. If you don't believe me ask Martin Fowler https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html . In this post I'll be covering some general conventions for naming things to improve readability and understandabilty of the code. There are lots of things that need a name in programming. Starting from higher abstractions to lower we need to name a project, API or library, we probably need to name the source code repository, when we get to the code we need to name our modules or packages, we give names to classes, objects, interfaces and in those we name our functions or methods and within those we name our variables. Overall a lot of things to name. TLDR; Basic rule There's a single basic convention to follow to achiveve better, more descriptive naming of things. Give it a meaningful name i.e. don't use shorthands like gen or single letter variables like a, x, z instead tell what it represents, what it does