What developers should know about acceptance tests details

What developers should know about acceptance tests details

e2e_developers

Many people think that testing is a subject that only testers should worry about them. I completely disagree with that statement. I can event say that developers can write better tests technically and faster. They know the application. They have technical knowledge about creating reusable code and good architecture. Nevertheless, they shouldn’t write an end to end acceptance tests. They are too focused on functionalists that write. So it is possible that they repeat the testing patterns from the development time, not on overall application image.

That’s why it is important that test should be written by other people that write the functionality. It’s the time when separate test team comes into the scene. They are focused only on testing and don’t have a deeper look into the technical details. That’s very beneficial.

How developers and testers can cooperate

Testers use the result of developers work. Usually, they can’t modify the application code, so this is very important to write it in a proper way.

When we asked testers, which part of the test writing process takes the most of the time? It works on defining and testing page element selectors. That’s the reason why developers should pay particular attention to design HTML correctly.

They should remember about few simple rules:

  • always use name attribute for input elements
  • use id if an element is unique on the whole page and its subpages
  • use class always if the element contains any data relevant to the user or it can make an action
  • use proper HTML semantic elements to mark page areas

As you can see this is only four rules. All of them is very simple and helps to organize HTML document. Try to think about it when you write HTML next time. Maybe you have some other methods to organize HTML structure?

You can find more information about end-to-end testing in my book and newsletter

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