Cypress Future of Web App Testing

With the evolution of development tools, the testing tools are evolving too, thereby supporting and strengthening the Quality Assurance process. One of them is automation testing when we talk about automation testing, we cannot ignore the most popular, open-source, and reliable tool called Selenium. Time’s have changed and the tools in automation are changing at a rapid pace, today we have numerous automation tools that can be used as a part of your automation process.

Why Cypress?

Cypress is an End-to-End javascript Testing framework that doesn’t uses selenium at all, which comes with a lot of inbuilt features that you will require in any automation tool. Cypress uses Mocha testing framework and chai assertion library in its framework and mainly it’s not built on top of selenium, it’s a new driver that operates within your application and this allows very good control over your frontend and backend of the application.

Cypress Vs Selenium

When it comes to debating Cypress vs. Selenium, it is recommended that teams start exploring Cypress to see if it can complement their existing Selenium scripts and grow their overall test coverage and stability.

Cypress and Selenium are both automation frameworks for web app testing. Selenium is an established solution, while Cypress is emerging. Cypress supports JavaScript, while Selenium supports many languages. Cypress supports end-to-end testing. Selenium does too, but also offers security and unit testing.

Do you know why Cypress is the most preferred Test Automation Framework for Web? If you don’t have an idea, here is why:

1. Cypress uses a ‘universal driver’ in the sense that it does not need ‘Selenium like’ Webdrivers for every browser to automate tests.

2. The Web is primarily driven by Javascript and so is the Cypress Framework.

3. Cypress is built for only one purpose, Web Automation that would not only enable QA developers to write End to End Tests but would also enable developers to quickly test their modern Javascript Websites while mocking everything else like databases or external dependencies.

4. Cypress comes bundled with a test browser (electron), a test runner, and the assertion library (mocha), which enables first-time users to quickly get started on testing and not figuring out intricacies of test automation setup.

5. Currently, Cypress supports Firefox (Beta), Edge, and all Chromium-based browsers such as Electron, Chromium, Chrome. There are plans to support I.E and Safari in the later versions.

6. Most testing tools operate by running outside of the browser and executing remote commands across the network. Cypress is the exact opposite. Cypress is executed in the same run loop as your application.

7. Cypress automatically waits for — the DOM to load, the element to become visible, the animation to get completed, the XHR and AJAX calls to be finished and many more. Hence, no need to define implicit and Explicit waits.

8. Cypress is intelligent enough to know that after saving your test file(xyz_spec.js file) you are gonna run it again. So cypress automatically triggers the run next to your browser as soon as you press CTRL+S to save your file. Hence, no need to manually trigger the run.

9. Cypress also operates at the network layer by reading and altering web traffic on the fly. This enables Cypress to not only modify everything coming in and out of the browser, but also to change code that may interfere with its ability to automate the browser. Cypress ultimately controls the entire automation process from top to bottom.

Cypress and Selenium serve a similar purpose that is achieved in two different ways. Cypress does not aim at replacing Selenium Webdriver, it aims at being unique at what it does and that is the automation of tests on the web.