2020-08-11 UI Testing Team Meeting Notes

ui-courses uses cypress and yakbak; are orthogonal

yakbak: from flickr

• provides access to a webservice to record "tapes" of the interactions, and play them back

  • annoying: expects tests to KNOW they're running with yakbak; ditto polly

yakbak-proxy: runs tapes via a proxy to work around that annoying bit

• counts put/post/delete requests in order

cypress: open

• in Jenkins, runs in headless mode BUT!! has screen caps for failed tests, and video

• mocha is the assertion library

• cy.* is analogous to nightmare.click, nightmare.wait, etc

• cypress is asserting lots of things behind the scenes

  • implicit wait, a la convergences, is 4 seconds

• "selector playground" can suggest use

• helpers: Cypress.Command.add to add helper function to cy*

• WRT documentation: "by some distance, the best ever"; active Gitter channel

see also: cypress' testing-library, a unit-testing companion to

• BigTest 2 has replaced Karma with their own runner

• functions similar to cypress: backend is a blackbox

• can point at any URL you want, i.e. can function for e2e tests
• any browser that can load a URL can connect to BigTest as an agent

• tests move state of app forward
• assertions are pure, cannot change state
  
  • lessons both in usage and expression
• borrows from Capybara
  
  • interactor sits between DOM and user
  • no more decorators; very functional composition of interactors
  • gives good error messaging when things fail
• interactor: defaultSelector is the "human readable" match
  
  • BUT can use any kind of match, e.g. name, id, aria-label etc

• mutating steps/pure assertions is very powerful, leads to easy auto optimizations w/in suite
• mutating actions are always evaluated so never have stale refs
• TypeScript! So you get intellisense when writing interactors
• BT runs a proxy in between running service and test runner

• very few deps ... but is all homegrown :/
• partnered with Jonas Nicklas (capybara creator; https://twitter.com/jonicklas?lang=en)
• pillars of architecture
  
  • data: all test result/assertion data available as graphql
  • structured concurrency: cleanup correctly
  • native agents: comm with browser via WebSockets
• i.e. tests are represented as data in GraphQL
  
  • representing assertion as a piece of data is very powerful
    
    • can get stack trace, detailed information
    • can write agent in

• note: structure is an exported structure
• it's up to the agent to interpret the test
• so can layer on new syntax, b/c just maps onto a data structure
  
  • e.g. cuke syntax is on the way because can just map Gherkin onto BT structure