Stop getting midnight calls because you broke the site on the last deploy: use Cypress for front-end testing! In this episode we talk about how we use the free, open-source testing framework Cypress to save time, catch bugs, and sleep better at night.

Links

• Episode Page
• Cypress
• Twitter Owl Creek
• Twitter Thomas Hintz
• YouTube

Show Notes

• What is integration testing?
• What are other types of testing?
  • Unit
• Story Time, life without good tests
  • Stories about poorly written tests
• Problem: new features get priority over testing
• Good tests with good coverage speeds up development!
  • I always write tests before refactoring because you can go wild and know that all you have to do is get the tests to pass in the end
  • Good tests give confidence: you can write new features/code a lot more quickly because you don’t have to think about breaking things, if somethings breaks you’ll know and you can fix it
  • Infrastructure investment: it’s like investing in better roads and transportation networks, it has an upfront cost but you can move people and goods faster and more efficiently afterwards
• Solution: new features priority over testing
  • Estimates include testing
  • Don’t demo until you have tests if demoing puts on pressure to finish before you wrote tests
• What to test? / Testing priorities?
  • Integration first (ensures things actually work for the end-user)
  • Then unit
• What is Cypress used for?
  • Integration Tests
  • Unit Tests
• What makes Cypress best suitable for the task?
  • Fast
  • Consistent
  • Screenshots, videos, logs
  • Network request spies, spoofing
  • CI Integration
  • Dashboard
• What I don’t like about Cypress:
  • Async API
    • Maybe necessary for this because of JS?
• Successfully Maintaining Tests?
• When to write tests?
• Cypress tips & tricks
  • Custom commands
  • Capturing values
    • Example: capture a numeric value, do test, check that the new value is correct based on old one

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