Chapter 14. Writing end-to-end tests
This chapter covers
- Setting up end-to-end tests with Nightwatch
- Writing end-to-end tests with the Nightwatch framework
- Running Nightwatch tests in Chrome and Firefox
As they say, all great things must come to an end. This is the final chapter of the book, and the last part of your quest to create a frontend testing suite. In this closing chapter, you’ll learn how to test a running application by writing end-to-end tests.
In this book you’ve learned how to write unit tests and snapshot tests. They’re both effective at testing individual units, but they have one glaring problem—they don’t check that the units of code work together. End-to-end tests solve this problem by performing tests against a fully operational application.
The first section of this chapter is about what end-to-end tests are, how they fit into a testing workflow, and how to write effective ones. After you’ve learned about end-to-end tests at a high level, I’ll show you how to write them.
You can use a few different tools to write end-to-end tests and automate a browser, but in this book I’ll show you how to write tests with a framework called Nightwatch that uses the WebDriver API under the hood.
In the main part of this chapter, you’ll learn how to write end-to-end tests that cycle through user journeys by automating Chrome. After you have some end-to-end tests running in Chrome, I’ll show you how to set them up to run in multiple browsers.