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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 tests;

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Text of the page (random words):
w real users interact with your web application including all of their logically related actions but have no additional unrelated actions furthermore you shouldn t test everything a user would ever do in a single test rather create multiple tests for each logical or functional operation that a user performs in your application this has the dual advantage of making your tests run faster since you can run independent distinct tests in parallel as well as making the issue clearer when a test run fails don t repeat yourself if you duplicate the same workflows across multiple tests you ll need to make the same updates in each of those tests when your application changes workflows that appear in multiple tests should be managed in a single location and referenced by other tests other workflows should be tested once and not duplicated create tests that are repeatable automated regression tests must be able to run repeatedly without changes and without failure the most common reason that a test is not repeatable is that the underlying account or application data changes on every execution the most robust tests are those that make relatively few assumptions about the account or application data but always have those assumptions met on every run examples of underlying data changes that invalidate assumptions that a test might make include a product goes out of stock a record was deleted when it should be present or it already exists when it shouldn t search results whose rankings have been re indexed and have changed another common issue with repeatability is non deterministic timing examples include testing a calendar widget with a static date this might work the day you create the test but probably won t work next week next month or next year running tests in parallel on an application that only allows one active session per user running tests against an environment that s mid deployment and is currently offline repeatability issues can also occur in scenarios that require unique names or values such as a test of a sign up flow that requires the user to register with a unique email address creating a new record in your system whose name is required to be unique within that account create tests that can run in parallel end to end tests run much slower than unit and integration tests to keep test suites running in a reasonable amount of time you should make tests small and run them in parallel parallelism can take a test suite that runs sequentially in 20 minutes and run it in 5 minutes or less with almost no extra work this is the second most important point of this guide factor your tests so that they can run in parallel and in an arbitrary order this guidance sounds easy but it requires intentional effort to abide by it the key to parallelizable tests is that each test operates on its own data and state that is tests might share a user account i e non mutable state but they should manipulate different records within the account as long as the tests don t alter the account e g don t delete it then the tests can run in any order and at once because there is no shared state between them running tests in parallel is the single best way to decrease the running time of your test suite which in turn delivers faster feedback to your team and actually increases their commitment to testing in the first place a good approach to creating parallelizable tests is to have tests that mutate state do so on records that are newly created take as an example a test where you can modify an existing record within your application the straightforward approach to implementing this is to find an existing record modify it and then verify the modification was saved but if that record is depended upon by another test then that test will likely fail when it is run perhaps you modified the name of the record and another test is looking up that record by name and no longer finds it or perhaps another test is verifying the last modified date of the record and that date is now updated every time you run this test instead of handling data conflicts between tests an alternative it to avoid them entirely one way to do that in this case would be to first create a new record and then immediately modify the record this test might take longer to execute since it s creating a new record but the advantage is that the test is now isolated from other tests another advantage to this approach is that you re working with a clean slate on every test run if the test fails midway through leaving a half created record in some unexpected state it won t impact any future test runs since they ll create their own record this is not the case for a test that modifies an existing record if the test fails in the middle of the run it may leave that record in an unknown state that you ll need to modify explicitly before your tests can pass again use stable selectors locators selectors sometimes called locators are the method by which most test automation tools identify an element to interact with there are two kinds of selectors css selectors these use the underlying page styling and structure to target elements css selectors share the same query language that s used by the document queryselector api css styling and in jquery xpath selectors these identify elements using a query language derived from xml xpath includes some additional ways of targeting elements that are not found in css selectors such as targeting an element by its text value we recommend using css selectors as they are easier to read and will be more familiar to front end developers the process of manually creating selectors is time consuming missing or incorrect selectors during test execution are also the cause of a lot of false positive failures this is because as the application changes selectors may no longer target the right element or may not target any element at all some automation frameworks can automatically build selectors for you alternatively if you re building your selectors manually you can reduce the chance of stale selectors by adding persistent html attributes to be used specifically in your selectors by adding these attributes it will make it more obvious to developers that a given change may break existing automated tests and it will give your automation an explicit and hopefully static element identifier the most common attributes used for this purpose are data test data testid data test id data cy isolate data that s touched by automated tests the users and accounts in your application that are used by test automation should not be used for any other purpose just as tests with shared data will conflict with each other and cause failures so too will modifications of the automation account data by real life users this is because any non automation modifications of the account data will invalidate assumptions that your tests are relying on to succeed these types of failures can be particularly hard to debug because modifications to the state often aren t obvious and there may not be an audit trail pointing to how the data was modified for example updating a record on the account may cause that record to appear at the top of a list sorted by recent edits which in turn can cause tests that make assumptions about the ordering of that list to fail to avoid these issues separate manual and automated testing at the highest level possible separate environments are best separate accounts within the same environment are good and anything finer grained than that should be avoided testing as part of your development process once you ve built your initial test suite you ll want to make a plan for updating and maintaining the suite over time your plan should answer the following questions who is responsible for maintaining tests smaller teams can identify an owner or set of owners for the entire suite larger teams are usually organized into different feature areas so each feature team should own their respective tests what tests are added as part of new feature development teams should identify what tests if any are added when a new feature is released what tests are added when bugs occur if your team does post mortems it s a natural opportunity to require adding a new end to end test as part of completing the post mortem running the same tests across different environments if you have multiple non production environments such as a qa environment and a staging environment you should consider running at least a small subset of your test suite in those additional environments whenever a deployment occurs you ll need to account for differences when running tests across environments for example if your tests involve authenticating as a user you may need to authenticate with different credentials depending on the environment your test will also need to account for the application being served from a different hostname end to end tests in a microservice environment many applications today are built using a collection of microservices this presents a challenge for end to end testing as a change to any microservice could cause a regression to an end to end workflow you could run your full end to end test suite after every microservice deployment but that might not be feasible or desirable depending on the frequency an alternative approach is the following group your end to end tests by feature area within your application most tools provide a way to organize tests into multiple tags or suites associate each microservice to the feature areas that they touch when a microservice is deployed invoke only the subset of your test suite associated with the feature areas it has modified tools like nx provide the ability to tie functionality to features allowing you to kick off the subset of your test suite that is affected by a given changeset sealights is another tool that can be used to measure the code coverage of your end to end tests synthetic testing in production one advantage of having an end to end testing suite is that it can also be used as a kind of monitor in production this type of testing is called synthetic testing and it s a hybrid of automated testing and monitoring we recommend taking your most critical and high trafficked workflows sign in sign up placing an order and running them on a schedule in production having a small subset of your regression suite run as synthetic tests in production can be a great way to augment a traditional monitoring suite and derive additional value from your test automation efforts running regression tests on every pull request sometimes referred to as shift left testing regression testing on every pull request moves the testing phase from right to left or earlier in the software development lifecycle when viewed in the traditional waterfall analogy open source tools like docker and kubernetes paas features like heroku review apps and vercel preview environments and fully managed tools like render and netlify make spinning up infrastructure on every pr possible common scenarios testing a login workflow the user sign in workflow is one of the simplest to test but also one of the most critical we recommend creating a dedicated user account specifically for this test and starting with a single happy path test that verifies this user can successfully log in to your application this user should either be in an environment that has no real production data or it should be in an isolated account with no ability to view real customer data see the test data management section for more info generally you should run the sign in test as part of your post deployment test suite and you might also consider running it periodically as a synthetic test in production it s an easy test to implement and it won t create data or inflate your usage metrics unlike say a test of your new user registration workflow be sure to include a final assertion at the end of the test that validates that the user successfully logged in this may seem obvious but it s not sufficient to confirm that the test enters credentials and clicks the login button the test must include a validation of some element that s only present if the login was successful we recommend validating something like an avatar or user s name on the subsequent page since that confirms login success and uniquely identifies the user verifying the presence of an authorization cookie or jwt it s a common trap to use implementation details of your application to verify things like whether a user is signed in in java servlet applications this is usually called a cookie called jsessionid third party authorization tools like aws cognito and auth0 store javascript web tokens jwts in local storage we don t recommend asserting against values like these in your tests because it violates the principle of validating things from the user s perspective stated differently the validation is too implementation specific not only could this cause false positive failures when the underlying implementation changes such as if you upgrade your authentication library but it will miss bugs where things look good with the authorization cookie but the experience is broken to the user potential scenarios include a bug in the front end code that prevents authorization state from being properly parsed and handled a caching issue which causes users to appear as if they re logged in as a different user testing the authorization endpoint directly verifying the endpoint used to authenticate a user is different than verifying that users can successfully log in the former case is easier to implement and gives you test coverage for a specific api endpoint and if you re using a third party authentication library it may not even reside in your web server while there is value in this type of test it s important to note that just like in the previous example any bugs occurring outside of the api endpoint itself won t be caught with this approach a test of this nature is generally considered to be an integration or api test testing a signup workflow new user registration is often a critical workflow to the business and should be near the top of the list when building your automation test suite there are a few items however that can present difficulties in automating this workflow each test needs to create a unique user user registration workflows generally only allow you to register an email address or username once this means the test will fail on every run after the first if the same email address is used to work around this your test should generate a unique email address on every run for email addresses we recommend using a common prefix such as testuser with a random series of characters before the this will make it easier for you to find and clear out test users in your database should you need to do so you may need to contend with captchas captchas are simple puzzles that are easy for humans to solve and very difficult for computers to solve in an automated way for tips on how...