Most of the End to End application testing used to be performed manually, with a QA team understanding the requirements, making test cases, executing the test cases, and recording the results. In modern software development, automation has become the foundational part of testing. The software can be tested on many tiers. When you design a system, you begin with a small piece of software, for which unit testing is sufficient. However, testing software at the unit level isn’t enough, and it does not guarantee that these small units should work perfectly when combined. This is where integration testing comes into the picture. In integration tests, two or more components are used together in a test, and the result is validated. Though all these tests run perfectly fine, integration testing can’t guarantee that the system will work as expected. This is where End to End testing comes into the picture.
End to End testing is closest to real user testing. Cypress is one of the best automation frameworks for E2E testing because Cypress runs the application in the browser, providing the experience as if the application is running inside the actual browser. The closer the test is to mimicking the user, the more likely it will locate issues that the users might experience. In automation, we start by automating lower units; we write our integration automation scripts once they are ready. Finally, once the integration test is done, we do End to End testing to ensure our script works correctly together.
Benefits of End-to-End Testing
There are several benefits of End to End testing. When discussing the worth of End to End testing for a business, the benefits are:
- In unit tests, you verify each component in isolation, and end-to-end testing examines the application from the end users’ perspective.
- In End to End testing, the application is tested at all the layers.
- This helps ensure the application being tested is bug-free and works seamlessly across the lifecycle.
- Since End to End, testing validates the health of your application at every level. It keeps the health and well-being of your application at all times.
- End to End tests can verify that each one of an application’s dependencies works correctly together.
- End to End testing helps us to test the entire application, both at the API and UI layers, from start to finish.
- In End to End testing, the application is tested in-depth after every sprint or iteration. This helps testers locate defects faster and earlier in the life cycle.
- Detection of bugs and issues sooner within the application development lifecycle minimizes testing efforts and costs.
- Extensive testing at every step ensures fewer bugs in the system and earlier identification of breakdowns in the software. This will reduce the repetition of tests and, therefore, ultimately, the associated effort, time, and costs.
- End-to-end testing additionally increases confidence in the functioning and performance of the application as the application is comprehensively tested across multiple devices, browsers, and operating systems.
End-to-End Testing by Cypress
Cypress is a next-generation front-end testing framework built with modern JavaScript frameworks. Cypress has a bundle of test runners and a dashboard service that records and displays test results. Cypress is often compared to Selenium; however, Cypress is both fundamentally and architecturally different. Cypress allows us to write several types of tests: end-to-end, integration, and even unit tests. You can learn more about the differences with this Cypress vs Selenium comparison. Cypress runs tests inside the browser, giving results almost identical to what the users would experience when using the application.
Conclusion:
Cypress offers a robust platform for end-to-end (E2E) testing, allowing developers to choose the approach that best suits their project’s requirements. E2E tests provide comprehensive validation of the entire application stack, while component tests focus on isolated testing
