Some times ago I faced the problem with the low quality of the customer’s demonstration. When we try to present our application for the wider audience, we have problems with doing some basic scenarios again and again. We thought that we well tested this functionality. We were using it every day, and everybody in our team was checking it after each change. However, the application functionality still evolving. Moreover, any modification of the code may result in changing final functionality. Because of many changes before demo we can’t test it enough to be 100% sure that everything works fine.

We had a set of unit tests, but even this doesn’t secure us from failures. Fortunately, we discovered a very simple tool that helps us.

What saves our application?

After one presentation we decide to start looking for the solution for us. We found it fast. It was end-to-en testing. When we read more about it, we concluded that it is a perfect tool for us. We create a set of tests that covers most scenarios used in demonstrations. It gives us confidence that everything works. Our primary problem was solved.

Other end-to-end testing advantages

Beside of the help during the presentation with customers, end-to-end testing provides a lot of possibilities.

• increase trust to application development team – shows managers, that application works on every time,
• can test the behavior of different browsers and environments fast – we can configure these tests to run against different machine configurations. It can significantly reduce the amount of time needed to test before release,
• can examine if the web application is fully accessible – accessibility is quite underestimated part of our applications, but it is not hard to achieve it. With a tool that can point us accessibility errors, we can do this much faster

Of course, it is high-level tests, and it shouldn’t replace unit tests for our application. They should only be a supplement to them for ensuring that system works as a whole.

[chimpmate]

End-to-end testing is a great improvement in quality testing automation. It reflects the user experience the most of all tests. This book is a complete guide to Selenium tools. Both for beginners and experienced developers. It just makes sure that system works fine, saving your time after all. See more