Ask HN: Twice): How to do proper front-end testing? Is it useful enough to do?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23857553

by melvinroest • 6 years ago

1 1 6 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Hello!

I'm currently in the situation where I'm noticing that the back-end is tested a fair amount of times, but the front-end does not have any automated tests.

So I was wondering: to what extent is UI testing even feasible / not a waste of time? What are pragmatic considerations about it? And if it is feasible, how does one go about it?

Things I thought about:

Is it simply using Selenium or Puppeteer? Is it using a visual diff and checking for that? Is it simply unit testing/integration testing?

To me, it all seems a bit of a waste unless a front-end process is super critical, like a checkout page.

ajeet_dhaliwal• 6 years ago

Back-end tests can be super robust immediately whereas front-end ones generally take some tweaking to get to that point. I still think they’re worth it, especially for testing the core feature happy paths. Selenium and the like are fine. Being end-to-end these type of tests cast a wide net so it’s worth logging the dev tools / browser network logs if you can at the time a test fails as well as taking a screenshot.

Use a cloud device service like BrowserStack and setup some CI. Who wants to test this stuff manually after the first time. Make sure the front end devs don’t change your data-* attribute tags or whatever else you’re using to find elements and are strict with that.

As lead dev and co-founders at Tesults.com I’d obviously recommend you use that for consolidating test reporting from your back-end and front-end tests :-)

Ask HN: Twice): How to do proper front-end testing? Is it useful enough to do?

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