Why is Cypress Popular?

A fast search on npm patterns reveals that latest trends in Cypress are indeed very popular for the JavaScript community. Since the projects that we’ve been interested in lately are all JavaScript-based, we have been using Cypress, and it’s an amazing tool! It’s used mainly for UI practical test automation, but we have also used it to test APIs and perform usability tests and visual validations.

The new version now supports Firefox (beta), and Edge browsers were built immensely from Cypress when launched. State JS 2019 has also announced that Cypress is the second most common testing platform, which indicates that many developers and QA engineers are moving to its use. The Cypress group is particularly involved with the launch of Cypress ambassadors. People should be humbled to be part of this introduction because it will enable them to communicate with talented developers and QA engineers worldwide and continuously learn industry standards.

Is Cypress Replacing Selenium?

Cypress is indeed not Selenium. Latest trends in Cypress are distinct, like comparing  Apples to oranges. In contrast, Selenium has been created to address the needs of QA engineers, who, in most situations, have no codebase access and tend to write E2E automation tests. On the other hand, developers want to write fast checks, with the long and slow writing of E2E automation testing being one of the concepts holds. Cypress has been developed for addressing the needs of the front end developers to convince them to write tests except for unit tests.

Front-end developers use JavaScript, which is why Cypress is only a JavaScript testing tool. QA programmers work on languages other than JavaScript, such as Java or C#, on different programming languages. Some would argue that the same thing is yet another research instrument. But it is well recognized that research is difficult. It’s much harder to write E2E checks. Selenium is not the best tool for certain developers since they cannot use asynchronous programs so quickly.

However, from other developers’ thoughts, they feel that certain QA engineers whose JavaScript project is still hesitant to move to Cyprus because Selenium lacks some functionality and has certain permanent and temporary sacrifices, as seen here. We assume that Selenium remains there, but with JavaScript’s rising success over the years and the increasing emphasis on testing automation, Cypress is sprinting upwards with QA engineers’ aid.

Why Should We Use Cypress?

While Cypress features have some compromises, it still has a lot to offer. Below are some points about why should a QA engineer learn and use Cypress:

1. Easy Installation And Setup

You can believe that we can get up and running with Cypress in less than 5 minutes when we say that. We won’t be performing a hole tutorial as there are a lot of awesome tutorials out there. The most important thing to note is that we are all good as long as we have node and npm installed. All we need is the following command.

npm install Cypress

We can run the following command, which will perform two things. First, it will create a scaffolding structure with recommended files to get started, and then it will open the Cypress UI test runner once Cypress is installed.

npx cypress open

As of Cypress 4.0, cross-browser functional testing is now also possible. Unlike with Selenium, where we don’t need to install any additional drivers for enabling cross-browser testing. Suppose we have the browser installed on our machine, with the need to select it from the drop-down list and click a file test to run. And that is pretty much it. We can focus on customizing our tests instead, as Cypress has made the installation and setup process so easy.

2. Cypress UI Test Runner

Cypress comes built-in with one of its unique offering of a UI test runner that allows us to see how our test runs on each action interactively. From the UI test runner, we could see how many tests passed or failed in the duration of running this test. It could also display a preview of our application and how it is behaving while being tested full-stop another nice feature is that we can use with the UI test runner is its ability to time travel. It means that we can easily detect our application’s state whenever we click on the action as Cyprus good time travel to different snapshots to see the application’s behavior. We also have Direct access to Chrome dev tools, and Cypress features will print additional useful blogs that our team and we might find very useful.

3. Excellent Documentation

The Cypress team has invested a lot of time trying and making the documentation easy for everyone. Their GitHub report also shows and an enormous list of various examples. As we mentioned above, some trade-off has been cited by trends of Cypress. Still, this trade-off cannot hinder us from trying the tool as the Cypress team has been detailing specific workarounds in the documentation site on these various limitations.

4. Clear Error Messages

Error messages provided by Cypress Ave very clear and easy for understanding as opposed to other tools where we are showing along with stack trace error. Productivity should be increased more as we spend less time figuring out why our test has failed.

5. Awesome Plugins

A collection of plugins that can boost the way we write our test is available with Cypress. We can use trends of Cypress for other types of testing as well. We can use Cypress acts that will allow us to catch some accessibility errors in our earliest stages. We can also use Cypress cucumber preprocessor and Cypress image snapshot, or even better; we can also integrate with applied tools for covering a cross-browser visual validation testing.

6. Encourages Developers to Write More Tests

Many companies are moving towards a model where developers are encouraged to test their code and write automated tests. Cypress promotes our culture where quality is every person’s responsibility and working in silos where a separate QA team writes that test on the different repository is discouraged. Latest trends in Cypress understands other pain points for developers and that they have created the tool that could fit in everyone’s toolbox.

The majority of the time, engineers struggle to strike a balance between manual and test automation. Testing the responsibility of writing automated tests with developers provides us with more time to focus on other important activities such as exploratory testing.

Also Read: Complete Guide to Cypress Automation