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description= Our comprehensive guide to creating automated test suites for web applications that aren t a pain to maintain.;
keywords= reflect, web testing, regression testing, automated web testing, end to end
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lt language next create a set of overrides for each language that replaces the expected values with the text localized to another language then run the test and instruct the application to render text in a different language which can usually be done by either running the test on a different subdomain e g testing against airbnb mx instead of airbnb com to verify spanish text within the mexico locale or by passing in an accept language http header for the locale you want to test e g es mx testing one off integrations with simple smoke tests many companies offer integrations that can be embedded directly into a customer s own web application these types of integrations often provide different types of customizations either via a set of options that the customer can choose themselves or via more sophisticated customizations that could be unique to each customer having test coverage for one off integrations straddles the line between testing and monitoring and can be a powerful approach for getting coverage for more complex actions versus a simple check of an http endpoint we recommend keeping these tests simple make very few basic checks so that you can sanity check that each integration is working without having the tests be a maintenance burden more comprehensive testing should be done on an example integration that you completely control bypassing authentication you ll likely have many tests that require a user to log in one performance optimization to speed up your tests is to bypass the username and password entry and start each test as a logged in user how you implement this depends on how authentication works on your application for example your application may support the ability to pass a short lived token in a query parameter that serves to log in the user alternatively you could create an authenticated session by setting the proper cookies or session local storage values that represent a logged in user the downside of this approach is that you ll need to pass in new values for each test run as the authenticated state usually becomes invalid after a short period of time if you re bypassing authentication in your tests we still recommend having an isolated test of your full user authentication flow this ensures that you still have test coverage for the way that end users will log in to your application handling multi user test scenarios testing scenarios that involve multiple users can be challenging consider a multi user workflow that involves one user requesting approval and another user at a different permission level approving or denying the request here are two ways we could set up this test running the workflow sequentially this is usually the default approach and has the following steps login as requester find a specific item click a button to request approval for the item log out and log in as approver find item that s awaiting approval approve the request log out and log in as requester find item and verify that it is in approved state there are some problems with this approach it s a sequential test so it will take longer to run the test makes assumptions on the underlying data that can cause the test to be brittle one can mitigate the data dependencies by having a process or logic to reset the item back to the unapproved state prior to running the test we discuss this proactive explicit approach more in the test data management section another mitigation is to create a new item at the beginning of the test and request approval on it this will make the test longer but it will make it more resilient since it requires no data management we recommend taking the second approach using test data management and refactoring this multi user test into three separate tests in the following way a test to request approval of a new item a test that approves an item that is already in a pending state a test that views an already approved item we recommend combining this with a test data management approach that makes the following db updates prior to running the test suite set the item from test 1 back to its initial unapproved state set the item from test 2 back to a pending state to minimize the chances of missing bugs between the state changes in the tests we recommend ending each test with a validation that the item s state changed successfully this might be as simple as a text or visual check that the item s new status is displayed on the page running each user workflow in parallel consider a different example where you re testing an interactive chat program one key test is to validate that one user can post a message and another user can see that message running two tests in parallel can be an effective way of testing this type of workflow handling captchas captchas are questions or challenges that are easy for humans to solve but very difficult for machines to solve registration workflows often employ captchas to prevent automated account creation e g with bots thus solving captchas cannot be automated instead you ll need to either disable captchas in the environment you re testing or have some mechanism for conditionally disabling captchas for test accounts if you are using google s recaptcha you can use a separate key for testing environments to automatically pass all verification requests for more information about enabling automated tests in your environments with recaptchas read google s guide handling a b tests like captchas the best way to avoid problems from a b tests in your test automation is to disable a b testing in test environments if the environment must be deployed with the a b framework it s usually still possible to disable the framework by setting a cookie or browser storage value at the outset in the browser if neither of these options are available the next best option is to preset whether the user sees the a or b value in each running test this can usually be done by copying the cookie value controlling the a b tests from an existing browser session handling sites with http basic auth http basic authentication is sometimes used as a means of preventing test environments from being publicly accessible a page with http basic authentication enabled will prompt the user to enter a username and password using a native browser dialog that looks like this you can bypass the dialog by including the username and password in the test s url and we recommend doing this rather than attempting to automate the text entry in the dialog for example use https guest email protected http basic as the url including the username and password in the url directly should grant access and prevent the dialog from appearing for the duration of the browser session visual testing whereas functional regressions are bugs that affect the functionality of your site e g missing button visual regressions are bugs that affect the look and feel of your application these can be just as common as functional issues and have a similar impact to the user experience but strangely most testing frameworks provide no facilities for visual testing we recommend using a testing tool that has built in support for visual testing or adding on a third party library that is purpose built for visual testing adding visual checks to your tests imagine you are documenting a manual test case for an add to cart workflow a simplified version of that test case might look like the following navigate to amazon com and search for sku b00032g1s0 observe that tuscan dairy whole vitamin d milk gallon 128 oz product is displayed click the add to cart button observe that milk is added to the shopping cart with a quantity of 1 and a price of 3 99 when translating this into an automated test each of these observe steps could be represented as visual checks this gives you coverage for changes to the product name quantity and price additionally you could add visual checks for other things that you would likely be checking when manually testing but that are not documented in the manual test case these include things like the product thumbnail image the add to cart button the ui of the shopping cart pop up that displays when the add to cart button is pressed the ui of the resulting shopping cart icon showing as non empty what is not worth visually validating are the elements on the page that are not pertinent to the test and there are a lot of them the navigation bar the footer the sidebar etc are not related to this specific test case and validating these elements leads to noisy tests that fail for reasons unrelated to the test case that is why for visual tests we recommend only validating the elements explicitly pertinent to the test furthermore you should not have the same visual assertions across multiple tests for example if you are going to validate the top navigation bar do it in a single test and not on every test that interacts with the top nav similarly we recommend not using solutions that screenshot the entire browser window the visual contents of a web page will change over time for many benign reasons and it s unlikely that you ll want to fail an automated test for each one instead use tools that screenshot specific elements on the page when looking for visual differences using visual checks as smart wait steps visual checks can also be used as a signal to the test to wait before proceeding for example imagine that it takes several seconds for the shopping cart widget to appear after clicking add to cart for asynchronous actions like this you may be tempted to configure the test runner to sleep for a fixed number of seconds i e a hard coded wait this is a poor approach because in the best case your test will be waiting longer than necessary to proceed to the next step and in the worst case the time you chose to sleep won t be long enough and the test will fail erroneously instead of hard coded sleeps you should set up your tests to wait for a specific element to appear in the dom or similarly wait until an element has the expected visual state before proceeding the former is a good approach when you know that the element will only appear after the long running operation completes the latter approach is better if the element changes its visual state while the long running operation runs such as a button which appears with a disabled state until the operation completes test data management reasoning about test data management the getting started section describes how end to end tests should make assumptions about the state of the application and not the implementation of the application automated tests are simpler when they can assume more about the state of the application or environment we introduced test data management tdm as a means of actively managing application data which results in tests being more repeatable and easier to maintain over time tdm allows defining an explicit state for the underlying application data used in a set of tests and it generally provides a mechanism for updating the application data to produce the desired state managing first party test data with db calls or api calls you can manage your test data in several ways restore your database from a snapshot before executing your tests this is a heavy handed approach and works best for ephemeral environments that are used for testing on every pull request run a script to reset a subset of data prior to executing your tests we recommend this approach if you re testing against a long lived environment like a qa or staging environment managing third party test data with api calls your application likely has integrations with third party providers for things like authentication billing etc managing test data within third party systems is more challenging than in the systems you control you can use the provider s underlying apis to manage the data set up data before tests run don t tear down data after tests finish a frequent pattern in unit testing is to have a setup phase that sets up state before the tests run and a teardown phase that cleans up state after the tests run for end to end tests we recommend the concept of a setup phase but not a teardown phase this is because if tests fail you can view the application in its current failed state by using the application directly or by querying the database a teardown phase would clear application state which might be crucial information to help reproduce diagnose and root cause any bugs that caused the failure in the first place frequently asked questions what kinds of workflows should i test in a regression test test the workflows that are most critical to the business these are the workflows where bugs would have the greatest impact sign in and sign up flows are great candidates as are workflows that are part of your conversion funnel historically buggy happy path scenarios rather than error conditions regressions in the happy path will usually be more severe and impact a larger percentage of users creating effective tests for these workflows will reduce bugs and improve the quality of your software over time what shouldn t i test in a regression test avoid creating tests that would be better served as integration tests or api tests and of course avoid using end to end tests for pure monitoring liveness scenarios that don t interact with the application good end to end tests should closely mimic how a user interacts with your site if your test only performs network requests and validates their responses then it s better to write that as an integration test using a tool like postman should i still write unit tests and integration tests yes end to end tests aren t a replacement for unit and integration tests you should create all three types of tests so that you have defense in depth for bugs additionally this ensures that you re testing assumptions and requirements at different levels of your application architecture when should i run my regression test suite start by running your tests in the first environment that code reaches after it is merged ideally you ll run these tests automatically after every deployment to this environment once your tests are stable expand them to run in other environments running end to end tests on every pull request is a powerful concept but is harder to implement in practice get started with reflect today create your first test in 2 minutes no installation or setup required accelerate your testing efforts with fast and maintainable test suites without writing a line of code try reflect for free schedule a demo automated regression tests without a line of code product customers pricing articles sign in solutions web testing mobile testing visual testing api testing cross browser testing regression testing guide testing react apps salesforce testing selenium alternative company about us why reflect contact sales contact support terms of service privacy policy documentation overview recording managing tests api integrations copyright 2026 smartbear software all 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