Automated Testing of the Modern Web Application, Part One

The past three months I’ve been working with the two most popular automated JavaScript testing frameworks, Jest and Cypress, to test an existing production web application.

These frameworks provide a thoroughness, regularity of testing, and automation reliability that was unthinkable not too long ago. This enables an automated and appropriate scope of fast code testing every time a software developer saves or commits changes for a new feature or a bug fix. It also quickly tests an entire application before a new version is made available to customers. It’s a remarkable technical achievement, and the basic tools themselves are available at no cost.

Jest was created by Facebook in 2011. In 2014, it was released it as open-source software. It’s a robust, full-featured framework for performing web component and component integration testing.

Components are the small reusable building blocks of a modern application which are arranged together to provide today’s feature-rich user interface and underlying business logic. Component testing validates each component in isolation to ensure its logic works as intended. Integration testing verifies that when components are assembled in various combinations, the combined whole works as expected.

Tune in next time for end-to-end testing with Cypress…