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Thoughts on automated testing

I've been a software developer for ~15 years, but I only started getting really into automated testing the past 6 years or so. It took a lot of iteration, but I finally found an efficient testing strategy which is helping me get releases for my products way quicker than I would otherwise.

My last product was a commercial failure, but people were impressed that I was only spending 20 hrs/week on it instead of 60 hrs/week. Most of those people didn't encounter any bugs either.

I'm working on a new product now and to demonstrate its features (as well as help with onboarding and marketing), I made a guide to automated testing.

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    Nice. Testing can be a bad word on IH I assume because it gobbles up time that could be spent hacking more features (that will break). Selenium testing is usually called end-to-end testing no? I mean could use Cypress instead of Selenium.

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      I actually didn't know about Cypress until last week when someone read the article and mentioned it! I'll have to look into it and revise.

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    I went through the article, I think Selenium testing can be classified as Functional Testing, no?

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    Hi Beekey,

    Thank you for sharing the article, I'm building a no-code automated testing SaaS so this is a topic close to my heart.

    I'm a big fan of automated testing, purely because I'm a UX nut and I've always seen the limitation of unit & integration tests.

    To put it simply: users don't care if these server-side tests pass if the problem is happening in the browser, so complete end-to-end testing is required in order to properly test from a UX AND infrastructure perspective.

    Selenium is a great tool, but I discovered that it's too much hassle for many developers to set up unless you're part of a larger team and have the time and resources to invest in this area, which most people don't.

    This realisation lead me to building https://firelab.io - which enables devs to set up tests in the browser without any code.

    It's great to see someone else actually running tests, because most people don't for a variety of reasons but it's SO important.

    Finding out that your signup form has broken from the 99th user who tried it and failed is not a good situation to be in.

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      Firelab is pretty neat. I have a couple of questions though:
      1 - the UI makes it easy to build the first test, but is there a JSON configuration view or some other text view? In other SaaS products, I find that the UI makes doing the first or second thing easy, but it makes doing 100 things tedious.

      2 - Is there an export to something like Selenium or Cypress? Developers tend to care about vendor lock in more than most. Ironically, I still need to build an export for Dynomantle.

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        Thank you, I have neither of these things yet as I'm still very early stage, but I've noted them down on the roadmap under ideas for users to vote on :)

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