With the increased usage of web applications, web development technologies are evolving rapidly to provide a rich user experience. JavaScript based automation frameworks and tools are in demand and are replacing the traditional automation tools based on Java, Python, and C#. The primary reasons for the rise in JavaScript based automation frameworks are:
- Most of these are open-source
- Ability to automate latest web development technologies
- Direct interaction with JavaScript technologies provides high speed and less false positives
- Similar frameworks are used by both front-end developers and automation engineers to develop unit, integration, and UI automation tests
- Easy to add hooks in case of complex web-based scenarios
The most prominent JavaScript automation frameworks used by automation teams include:
Trend - JavaScript Based Automation Tools
Now, let's compare the increase in downloads for the tools mentioned above over the last two years.
As you can see, the usage of Cypress has increased dramatically during this time period.
Percentage increase in downloads since April, 2018
Why Cypress?
Before Cypress, it was a very tedious task to set up a JavaScript based automation environment. Cypress enables us to set up the automation environment, including the libraries, in one go. The following are a few features that make Cypress a preferable automation tool:
- Own automation driver (No dependency on Selenium WebDriver)
- Default timeout at every step (Intelligent wait to reduce false positives)
- Intuitive dashboard to view and execute test scripts
- Plugin for visual testing, like Applitools
- Cypress-axe plugin for acceptance testing
- Real-time test file reloading to run on browser (When you save the test file)
- Work on the network layer to control the web traffic
- Video recording of complete suite execution
Best Practices to Automate JavaScript Based Technologies
At QASource, engineering teams are working extensively on the automation of JavaScript based UI technologies. Here are a few tips which can help you to automate the latest JavaScript based technologies:
- Use a tool which auto-synchronizes with JavaScript macro tasks
- Utilize TypeScript as an additional programming language in the framework, as it provides support to implement OOPs concepts
- Use async/await keywords to handle promises based methods
- Avoid using callback chaining
Have Suggestions?
We would love to hear your feedback, questions, comments and suggestions. This will help us to make us better and more useful next time.
Share your thoughts and ideas at knowledgecenter@qasource.com
