Gerald Senarclens de Grancy and Tomaz Bevec
Like all automated software testing, web frontend testing is an integral part of producing high quality web-based user interfaces. There are many great open source tools facilitating this challenging task. This talk will introduce you to some criteria for choosing a tool for automated end-to-end web testing. You’ll then learn about a selection of existing options before seeing some of the best tools in action.
The talk starts by highlighting the importance of test automation in general. It will then point out different aspects when deciding upon a frontend testing framework (eg. Platform + Browser independence, required programming skills, the possibility of doing ATDD, maintainability of tests (robustness to changes), integration to existing CI, support, documentation, ease of use, ...).
Thereafter you’ll learn about different approaches to testing web sites (Selenium WebDriver, pure JS solutions like Puppeteer, TestCafe and Cypress as well as designated testing IDEs). You’ll get an introduction of how to use Selenium WebDriver with Python to create reliable tests. We’ll demonstrate how they could be implemented and how they are executed against a sample website. You’ll see some challenges faced when doing web FE testing and how to overcome them. If there is enough time, we may also show other testing tools, demonstrate acceptance test driven development (ATDD) as well as behavior driven development (BDD).
Finally, we would like to have an open exchange about best practices when testing web front-ends.