Frontend testing: what and how to test, and what tool to use? - testing

I have been writing tests for my Ruby code for a while, but as a frontend developer I am obviously interested in bring this into the code I write for my frontend code. There is quite a few different options which I have been playing around with:
CasperJS
Capybara & Rspec
Jasmine
Cucumber or just Rspec
What are people using for testing? And further than that what do people test? Just JavaScript? Links? Forms? Hardcoded content?
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

I had the same questions a few months ago and, after talking to many developers and doing a lot of research, this is what I found out. You should unit test your JavaScript, write a small set of UI integration tests and avoid record and playback testing tools. Let me explain that in more detail.
First, consider the test pyramid. This is a interesting analogy created by Mike Cohn that will help you decide which kind of testing you should be doing. At the bottom of the pyramid are the unit tests, which are solid and provide fast feedback. These should be the foundation of your test strategy and thus occupy the largest part of the pyramid. At the top, you have the UI tests. Those are the tests that interact with your UI directly, like Selenium does for example. Although these tests might help you find bugs, they are more expensive and provide very slow feedback. Also, depending on the tool you use, they become very brittle and you will end up spending more time maintaining these tests than writing actual production code. The service layer, in the middle, includes integration tests that do not require an UI. In Rails, for instance, you would test your REST interface directly instead of interacting with the DOM elements.
Now, back to your question. I found out that I could greatly reduce the number of bugs in my project, which is a web application written in Spring Roo (Java) with tons of JavaScript, simply by writing enough unit tests for JS. In my application, there is a lot of logic written in JS and that is the kind of thing that I am testing here. I am not concerned about how the page will actually look or if the animations plays as they should. I test if the modules I write in JS will execute the expected logic, if element classes are correctly assigned and if error conditions are well handled. For these tests, I've been using Jasmine. This is a great tool. It is very easy to learn and has nice mocking capabilities, which are called spies. Jasmine-jQuery adds more great functionality if you are using jQuery. In particular, it allows you to specify fixtures, which are snippets of the HTML code, so you don't have to manually mock the DOM. I have integrated this tool with maven and these tests are part of my CI strategy.
You have to be careful with UI tests, specially if you rely on record/playback tools like Selenium. Since the UI changes often, these tests keep breaking and you will spend a lot of time finding out if the tests really failed or if they are just outdated. Also, they don't add as much value as unit tests. Since they need an integrated environment to run, you will mostly like run them only after you finished developing, when the cost of fixing things is higher.
For smoke/regression tests, however, UI tests are very useful. If you need to automate these, then you should watch out for some dangers. Write your tests, don't record them. Recorded tests usually rely on automatically generated xpaths that break for every little change you do on your code. I believe Cucumber is a good framework for writing these tests and you can use it along with WebDriver to automate the browser interaction. Code thinking about tests. In UI tests, you will have to make elements easier to find so you don't have to rely on complex xpaths. Adding class and id elements where you usually wouldn't will be frequent. Don't write tests for every small corner case. These tests are expensive to write and take too long to run. You should focus on the cases that explore most of your functionality. If you write too many tests at this level you will probably test the same functionality that you have previously tested on your unit tests (supposing you have written them).
In my current project I am using Spock and Geb to write the UI tests. I find these tools amazing. They are written in Groovy, which suits better my Java project.

There are lots of options and tools for that. But their choice depends on whether you have a web UI or it's a desktop app?
Supposing from the tools you've mentioned it's Web UI. I would suggest Selenium (aka WebDriver): http://seleniumhq.org/docs/
There is a variety of languages it supports (Ruby is in the list). It can be run against a variety of browsers, ad it's quite easy to use with lots of tutorials and tips available.
Oh, and it's free, of course :)

I though as this post gets a lot of likes, I would post my answer to my question as I do write lots of tests now and how you test front end has moved on a lot now.
So in terms of FE testing I spent lot of time using karma with Jasmine, although karma will work nicely with other test suites like mocha & qunit. While these are great and karma allows you to interface directly with browsers to run your tests. The downside is as your test suite gets large it can become quite slow.
So recently I have moved to Jest which is much faster and if your writing react app, using enzyme with snap shot testing give you really good coverage. Talking of coverage Jest has Istanbul coverage built in and set up and mocking is really easy simple to use. The downside it doesn't test in browser and it using something called jsdom which is fast, but does have a few nuisances. Personally I don't find this a big deal particularly when I compile my code through webpack/babel which means the cross browser bugs are fairly few and far between, so generally isn't an issue if you manually test anyway (and imo you should).
In terms of working within the rails stack, this much easy now that the webpacker gem is now available and using npm and node is generally much more excepted. I would recommend using nvm to manage your node versions
While this isn't strictly testing, I would also recommend using linting as this also picks up a lot of issues in your code. For JS I use eslint with prettier and scss/css I use stylelint
In terms on what to test, I think as Carlos talks about the test pyramid is still relevant, after all the theory doesn't change, just the tools. I would also add to be practical about tests, I would always test, but to what level and coverage will depend on the project. It is important to manage your time and spending hours/days testing a short lifecycle project. Larger/longer term projects the benefits of a larger test suite is obviously greater.
Anyway I hope that helps people that look at the question.

Related

Automatic testing of web applications with Selenium

is there any tool out there that i can used to set-up run automatically and i was goggling and i found selenium test runner? there are so many tools out there its hard to figured out which is best
I'm using C# and using MSTest as a test framework and I'm looking forward to see if I can get a way from testing in MSTEST
any help?
This is very subjective question. Every requirement will have its own correct answer. Anyhow I will try to address few requirements and will be updating as I learn more.
If you are automating web app browser tests (sans flash player and silverlight) I would say that selenium is the way to go. There are ways to automate flash and silverlight too, but that is answer for another question.
Selenium is anyways an automation too and your choice will rather is of which test framework to select. So here are few options:
1. Integrating with CI tools:
If you want to organize your tests as segregated atomic units and want them to be integrated to some CI server (e.g. TeamCity). I will recommend using NUnit to run your selenium tests.
2. Behavioral Tests
It is a new trend in the software development and how we test our products. Using behavioral (i.e. business specification) like language. In my experience it is also a very good format to write up acceptance tests. You can use selenium with something like Nbehave or SpecFlow
3. Centralize Test management and Execution
Now this might not fit for everyone but I have found FitNesse (and its c# binding) to be very useful in maintaining and executing selenium test cases.
Please note this answer may not be right and is certainly not complete given the scope of the question. I have nevertheless tried provide few pointers.

End to end testing framework recommendations

I am in a new project that is looking to include an end to end testing framework.
We want something flexible, I've used Fitnesse before and I think we need something similar to it.
We are also using Hudson CI and are looking for something that would integrate easily with it.
Is there a clear winner?
UPDATED: The system has many components, some of them are web services running on tomcat, there are a couple of NoSQL databases too, but no UI testing is required for the moment.
Please add a comment if further clarification on the project details is needed.
The robot framework is a good keyword driven testing framework that we use for end to end integration testing.
http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/
There is a plugin for jenkins (a fork of hudson) that is very useful. It reportedly works with hudson as well.
Great to read you have decided start using Robot Framework. Its Hudson plugin already has recently got much better (trend charts, available from Hudson directly, ...) and moved to new place:
http://wiki.hudson-ci.org/display/HUDSON/Robot+Framework+Plugin
Can you be more specific, when you say, you want to have an end-to-end testing framework? What kind of application are you developing (standalone, web based, web service, ...)? What language do you program in?
I would also look for previous knowledge in your team or around your team (e.g. other teams). It might be sufficient, to use TestNG or JUnit (I have seen an old paper on UI testing using JUnit). Almost all test frameworks should be fine for Hudson, as long as they can be started in a headless/scripted mode and if they provide the results in a format that Hudson understands (in the worst case HTML is sufficent, though Hudson will only be able to display the pages). So if you have IBM Monitoring tools available, you might want to look at Rational Functional Tester or Rational Performance Tester.
FitNesse is a good tool for functional testing. The business contacts can create the test cases by themselfs (developers have to provide some connector code), which will create more visibility and removes some work from the test engineers. Drawback is, that you can't really do UI testing. If you need a open source plattform for UI, have a look at seam. Even though I like the OSS philosophi, you might need longer ramp up time (higher costs) and possibly more maintainace time for OSS (not true for all OSS). In any case, check how easy it is to get support for your framework. You might even consider paid support for your framework (regardless if open or closed source). Also don't forget, even though you can fix OSS source yourself, you might not have the expertise or time for fixing bugs or adding features.
So give us more info and we can give you better advices.
My experience with jBehave is very good. Recommend.
It's based on BDD - Behavior Driven Development.

How do I test my iOS Apps

My question maybe silly, but can anyone coach me?
Except doing some test(most likely white box testing) while coding, after the App was built, do we have some testing tools or special method for doing the test?
All I can imaging for now, is only manual testing the functionality of my App.
Thanks everyone.
Update: Added section 'Automated testing for iOS4'
As a professional tester my suggestion is that you should have a healthy mix of automated and manual testing. The Examples below are in .net but it should be easy to find a tool for whatever technique you are using.
AUTOMATED TESTING
Unit Testing
Use NUnit to test your classes, functions and interaction between them.
http://www.nunit.org/index.php
Automated Functional Testing
If it's possible you should automate a lot of the functional testing. Some frame works have functional testing built into them. Otherwise you have to use a tool for it. If you are developing web sites/applications you might want to look at Selenium.
http://www.peterkrantz.com/2005/selenium-for-aspnet/
Continuous Integration
Use CI to make sure all your automated tests run every time someone in your team makes a commit to the project.
http://martinfowler.com/articles/continuousIntegration.html
Automated testing for iOS4
Automate the testing of your application by scripting touch events using the new UIAutomation Instrument.
Some links:
http://answers.oreilly.com/topic/1646-how-to-use-uiautomation-to-create-iphone-ui-tests/
http://cocoawithlove.com/2008/11/automated-user-interface-testing-on.html
http://alexvollmer.com/posts/2010/07/03/working-with-uiautomation/
MANUAL TESTING
As much as I love automated testing it is, IMHO, not a substitute for manual testing. The main reason being that an automated can only do what it is told and only verify what it has been informed to view as pass/fail. A human can use it's intelligence to find faults and raise questions that appear while testing something else.
Exploratory Testing
ET is a very low cost and effective way to find defects in a project. It take advantage of the intelligence of a human being and a teaches the testers/developers more about the project than any other testing technique i know of. Doing an ET session aimed at every feature deployed in the test environment is not only an effective way to find problems fast, but also a good way to learn and fun!
http://www.satisfice.com/articles/et-article.pdf
Take a look at automated testing tools. Supports automated and manual testing/sending feedback from within the app with annotated screen shots
I suggest you take a look at the iPhoneUnitTests sample code posted by Apple on their developer site.
FoneMonkey is a free and open source functional testing automation tool available for download from Gorilla Logic.
There a number of emerging options for automated functional testing, including Appium, Calabash, Frank, and Zucchini.
Much of testing any application is about understanding what you are testing and areas that should be tested. Some of this comes with experience, but types of things to consider testing about would be:
Functionality
iOS Design Guidelines / UI
Gestures
Connectivity
Types of devices to test on
Audio
Data
Crash reporting
Analytics
There's a big list of areas to cover.
I recommend Kiwi, its used for Behavior Driven Development. By far my favorite testing framework, makes testing much more fun, and test much readable and clear.
https://github.com/allending/Kiwi

Automatic testing of web pages (and generating from use cases by DSL)

My goal is:
Our customers could generate new web-tests.
Our continuous integration server makes a test-environment deployment; it should execute the tests against it
The test could also be run against some other environment.
(Final acceptance tests should be made by the customer, to test fonts etc, but this would be a great pre-acceptance check for our test-environment. Customers could focus on other things than now.)
Usually some property (like text field id) has changed or something and the tests will break in a few weeks. It seems that recorded tests broke often, so it's better to easily record a new one than trying to maintenance and modify an old test.
Now, I found a whole new approach. Maybe recording is not the right way.
How about, if our customers could make use cases in a human readable own language which the machine would understand and compile to web-recording (with Domain Specific Language, DSL).
This is not sci-fi, it has been already made, so read on. :-)
I have tried to use these automatic web testing frameworks:
Visual Studio web test (Customers can't execute)
Selenium (Works only with Firefox, our customers have IE)
WatiN (.NET version of Watir, recorder seems to be a bit buggy)
HP Quick Test Pro (Not easy enough to make new tests)
None of these have provided actually what I need... but Selenium is the closest one.
Our customers speak Finnish, so in the beginning of a software project, in specification phase, user writes a use case like:
Avaa "OmaLomake"
Syötä "Tuomas" kohtaan "nimi"
Paina "Seuraava"
Translation:
Open "MyForm"
Insert "Tuomas" into field "name"
Press "Next"
Now... This is a human-readable use case, but also it can be compiled to automatic web acceptance test. Open, Insert, into field and Press are keywords, others are values.
What kind of DSL tool would be good for this?
Microsoft is making a new DSL-making-tool in their Oslo-project called MGrammar. It means that you can make a custom language to make it easy for non-technical people to work with machines. (The same basic idea that was (and failed) with Cobol and Visual Basic.)
I found that someone has already made this kind of DSL with MGrammar, but it is for Watin, not Selenium:
http://www.codinginstinct.com/2008/11/creating-watin-dsl-using-mgrammar.html
So the continuous integration server process will be:
Fetch a new version from source control (as usual).
Build, run unit tests and analyze the code (as usual).
Make an installation package and tag version in version control (as usual).
Compile use cases to web tests
Run web tests
Accept/Reject the software :-)
Running a web-test in the continuous integration server usually means a lot of configuration work. So, before I try this, I'm curious, what do you think?
Have you used same kind of setup, and what are your experiences? (What exact environment?)
How about DSL, will it have enough power for use cases or will it be another endless development task? Will the customers ever generate the tests?
First of all, Selenium does work with IE and other browsers as well as Firefox; cross browser support is one of its strengths. Here's the list of supported browsers.
However, if you want a human language-based DSL for writing your tests, take a look at Cucumber - the syntax is almost exactly like your example above. Cucumber already has Finnish language support - see the examples at this link.
Fitnesse and Selenium Integration tools such as Selenesse(http://github.com/marisaseal/selenesse) or Fitnium(http://www.magneticreason.com/tools/fitnium/fitnium.html) can also serve your purpose. However, you need to find answer for who will put the element locators in the test cases written by customers. If customers put the locators using the recorders, it may not be possible to maintain. If customers write the steps and a automation tester/developer can put those locators using regex, custom location strategy, this approach may work.
The TestPlan software uses a specialize language for writing tests. It is highly domain specific and works very well in web environments. It supports the Selenium backend so you gain that compatibility, plus it can run without a browser, for even faster tests. I have used it on some fairly large web projects in the type of setup you are looking for.
Your example script might look like this:
GotoURL /SomePage
Click MyForm
SubmitForm with
%Params:name% Tuomos
%Submit% value:Next
end
That's it. It nicely describes what the user wants to do and is a functioning test. You can combine scripts into units and have custom function as well. So if you really wanted you could write the Finish equivalents to the names.

Selenium tests: html vs code?

Is it better to write/record selenium tests in html format and run them directly in the server with "-htmlSuite" or to write the tests in java/C#/... and run them in the server using selenium-rc?
What is the recommended solution?
I would always recommend people writing their Selenium Tests in a programming language because it allows the tests to be a lot more expressive.
You can create common methods that all tests use and if that changes you can then update 1 method to get n tests passing because they all fail on that item. One example of this is the Page Object model which is a development method for tests that suggest you create a DSL for each page you interact with and then your tests read a lot more fluently to both technical and non-technical people.
If you write your tests in a programming language you can also take advantage of Selenium Grid which runs your tests in parallel to make them faster
I'd highly recommend you look at moving to Selenium in C#, Ruby,PHP or Python. I found many timing issues resolving once I got away from the HTML Selenese.
I might keep in mind how you plan on executing your recorded tests. For instance, it might be trivial to incorporate Selenium's generated JUnit tests into a pre-existing JUnit-based testing framework.