Adventures of end-to-end automated web testing in Node.js

Good morning everyone and thanks for having me along to speak.

My name is Alister Scott and I’m from Brisbane. I work as a QA generalist at a software company in Brisbane called Console, and I write a blog called WatirMelon. Today I’m going to be sharing my knowledge of end to end automated testing in Node.js. I’ve created very simple but working demos of the main tools I’ll be discussing today and I’ve put these on GitHub as separate repositories you can easily clone and play around with: github.com/alisterscott

Outside of work I enjoy hiking, often to the summits of mountains, and spending time with my wife and our three young kids.

In 2015 I started a paid trial at Automattic. My trial project – on which I would be assessed to gain full time employment – was to establish an automated e2e testing framework for WordPress.com – the first of its kind for Automattic. I quickly spun up a framework using Watir in Ruby – because that’s what I knew – and it worked. However I quickly gained some feedback that of the hundred+ developers at Automattic almost none knew Ruby and creating shared ownership for e2e tests would be a key measure of success so I had to rethink. At the time Automattic was moving from primarily developing in PHP towards Node.js meaning full stack JavaScript and it made sense that the e2e tests were also developed in Node.js.

This of course made my trial project a lot more difficult than I had originally thought as I had to teach myself Node.js and understand what testing tools existed in this space.

Fast forward to 2019 and earlier this year I decided to change jobs as I could no longer travel for work. When I started looking at job advertisements for testing and QE positions in Brisbane I noticed just how many mentioned Node.js as their technology stack of choice: in the 3.5 years at Automattic Node.js had become increasingly popular at other companies as well.

But automated e2e testing in Node.js was and is really hard. Much much harder than I was used to in Ruby and Watir where things just worked.

It’s slightly better in 2019 than 2015, however there are some reasons why it’s hard.

There’s also the paradox of choice when it comes to tooling specifically for e2e web testing. Searching for selenium and WebDriver on NPM provides a list of dozens of libraries – and the official Selenium bindings (WebDriverJs) don’t appear when searching for WebDriver. It’s all very confusing.

My aim today is to create some clarity in this space.

I believe there’s more e2e test tools in Node.js that something like Java or C#. I’ll talk about the four most popular/mature ones.

Cypress.io is better suited to component testing than true end-to-end testing. Cypress.io also doesn’t support cross-domain stuff – so beware if you’re doing anything like that.

You’ll need your own test runner and assertion library.

I’ve distilled these four tools down into an easy to read visual.

And an even easier to understand flow chart.

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