Introduction to Cypress Test Automation Tool

With the increase in demand for modernized automation tools, it is becoming more important than ever to provide products to the market faster than ever. While Selenium is one of the most widely used tools for web automation testing, other open-source automation tools are becoming more popular in the market. One of those tools is cypress. It tries to solve the basic problems that modern web applications face.

Cypress is compatible with many of the modern applications that are built on react, angular, and so on. Often, people compare Cypress with automation tools like Selenium. There are a lot of opinions regarding which of the two tools [cypress and selenium] is better when it comes to automation.

What is Cypress Test Automation?

Cypress is a framework for modern automation that is based on the Nodejs platform, and it supports JavaScript and TypeScript as the programming language. However, it is still the most popular and easy-to-use tool in the automation world. And it is becoming a favourite among developers and testers, despite that it is not new.

Cypress is completely free, so you do not need to purchase a license for it. This is a tool that allows us to create test cases while our application is being developed. So, you can use it best in a framework for testing and development. For testing purposes, the Cypress dashboard service is also available.

Cypress is a tool which can be used to carry out varied tests like unit tests, integration test, API test etc. Its architecture makes it a popular choice for developers and QA s as adds a degree of efficiency to the process of development and testing.

Cypress runs on real browsers and driver binaries are not required. One single platform is shared between the automated code and the application code and this provides complete access to the application which is being tested resulting in speed efficiency.

Features of Cypress

- Controls All Network Traffic:

Cypress gives you all the access to control your network traffic and even you can easily customize your API calls as per your need.

- Click while you Test:

You can use time travel to capture snapshots of your application when the tests are running. If I was a test developer, I could hover over the command of the test runner and see what happens at each step.

- Your work is on Automation:

When you use Cypress, you do not need to put explicit waits or sleeps on your tests. It waits for commands and assertions before it starts executing.

- Runs of Continuous Integration Services:

Cypress is the popular new app which is built on top of an electron, which is the same as vscode and Spotify desktop apps. Cypress can be executed on any operating system, including Mac, Linux, and Windows. It is possible that a developer can install cypress using the standard “npm install –save-dev cypress” or “yarn add -d cypress” commands.

The same commands that I have used for installing and running on most systems CI work right out of the box and when I am using one of the cypress-provided docker images.

- For visual testing across browsers:

In this age of digitalization, there is another important aspect of web application testing. That is, you should examine the look and feel of your app on all these platforms, different screen sizes, resolutions, and technologies. Cypress supports various kinds of visual tests, like screenshots and other types, and it integrates with tools like applitools, percy.io, happo.io, and others for visual testing at scale.

It is important to understand the architecture of Cypress to gain insights into the backend action.

This article discusses Cypress architecture in the later sections.

All about Cypress Dashboard

The Cypress dashboard service should be set up to ensure there is a link between the Cypress tests that are running in our system and the dashboard, which is hosted in the cloud.

Features of Cypress Dashboard

Below are some more details about what features of Cypress Dashboard are available.

• The detailed report that shows the total number of passed, failed, and skipped tests are provided by cypress.
• There is a stack to trace the tests, and there are all the screenshots of the failed tests.
• You can also watch the video of the tests that are being executed and implement them accordingly.
• The test data and frameworks that are used for testing are easily accessible.
• A data-oriented recent trend of the organization is provided to get the best results out of it.

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