Why More End-to-End Testing is Good for less stress?

In the ever-evolving world of software development, quality assurance is paramount. When it comes to testing, End-to-End testing stands out as a robust approach. In this blog, we’ll explore why End-to-End testing is often good enough to ensure software quality and how a backend testing tool that automates E2E tests can simplify the process.

The E2E Testing Marvel

When it comes to testing software applications, there are various approaches, each serving a specific purpose, but one of the most comprehensive and reliable methods is End-to-End testing.

It lets you play Sherlock Holmes, ensuring that everything in your software behaves as expected from start to finish. It is a type of software testing that evaluates the entire application workflow, from start to finish. It simulates real user scenarios, interacting with various components and subsystems to ensure that the application functions seamlessly.

How End-to-End testing differs from UI testing

The main purpose of UI testing is to make sure that a system’s user interface works correctly when you give it information and when it shows you information. This is done by pretending or copying the behind-the-scenes parts of the system.

On the other hand, E2E tests focus on checking if the whole system works properly, without involving the user interface. Let’s say we have a process for making payments where our system talks to another system to handle payments. When we do UI tests for this, they might fail because of unexpected things like a pop-up window showing up where it shouldn’t or the system wrongly saying that something is wrong with the information you put in, even if the part that talks to the other system is working fine. These issues can make the tests look like they failed when they didn’t, and this can be frustrating and make people less confident in the tests we have.

Testing pyramid :- courtesy of @hackr.io

Benefits of more E2E

The testing pyramid places E2E tests in the upper tier suggesting having more E2E tests than unit & integration tests because they can be costly and hard to maintain.

Since we are not testing smaller components, a small number of tests can cover most user cases. And, despite their faults, the fruit they bear generally makes the effort worthwhile.

Now, a question that comes to our mind is "How does End-to-End Testing Stand Out?"

1. Comprehensive Coverage: It helps in verifying the entire application workflow, mimicking how real users interact with your software.
2. Realistic Scenarios: E2E tests replicate real-world scenarios, making them highly effective in identifying issues that users might encounter in actual usage. for example: – In a social media application, E2E testing can simulate users posting content, liking, commenting, and sharing. It verifies that all these actions are functional and cohesive.
3. Reduced Integration Problems: By testing how different software components interact, you can detect problems before they become major roadblocks.
4. Improved User Experience: Since E2E testing replicates real user interactions, it directly contributes to enhancing the user experience.

Pitfalls of E2E testing

End-to-End tests are great, but come with their own set of problems. They are notoriously flaky and often fail for unexpected and unforeseeable reasons. They are heavily dependent on the environment; keeping purity and predictability intact is tough. False positives happen often–mostly because of small issues with the environment. Systems might rely on third party integration that can affect the execution of tests, etc.

One-stop solution for this problem?

Tools such as Keploy can help in overcoming the common pitfalls of End-to-End testing, by automatically generating the test cases and Data mocks/stubs by capturing the API calls in real-time. It also mocks the dependency (if any is present) in the software which traditionally costs a lot while testing and sometimes even affects the execution of tests.

The Mocks and Test are generated in the form of \yaml\, to help you integrate 🚀 tests and mocks in CI pipelines for fast executions of E2E tests and gain confidence about the function of your systems.

Final Thoughts

End-to-end testing holds a prime position in the testing hierarchy, and despite its potential complexities in maintenance and execution, it offers significant value in assuring system performance and reliability for end-users.

When executed correctly and with the support of the appropriate Continuous Integration (CI) tools, End-to-End testing becomes a seamless and essential component of the development process. Moreover, it can be harnessed to guarantee high system availability.