Frontend Robot
Automated testing for the web. Simplified.
Today we are introducing our "smart triggers", which are essentially webhooks on steroids. A smart trigger will recognize the service that is invoking the webhook and will extract some useful information such as the code repository URL. This allows some cool integrations, such as the one described in the blog post below.
https://frontendrobot.com/blog/continuous-deployment-with-netlify-frontendrobot/
Frontend Robot can now hook into your Github repository and - among other things - automatically run a test suite after a successful deployment. Works great with Zeit Now and Heroku.
Read more on https://frontendrobot.com/blog/introducing-github-integration/
We've come a long way since the initial release of Frontend Robot. On each deploy, the application gets more useful, more stable and more usable. The marketing site more attractive and informative. We now have a docs section and a steady user base.
It's a massive amount of work, it wasn't done in a week but eventually it has been done! And it feels great.
If you are trying to build anything serious, be prepared to work on it for months or years. Be comfortable with having a mountain of todos in front of you. Become a master in prioritizing tasks. If working long-term isn't your forte, then give up now and you'll spare yourself another unfinished project.
The Frontend Robot MVP required around 10 months of work and although that can seem a long time, the MVP was still not usable in a real-world scenario. After the soft launch, many users were leaving because of bugs or simply because they expected a feature that was yet to be implemented. My take from this is that you shouldn't expect from an MVP anything more than learning about your customers and the problem you are trying to solve.
We see stories of MVPs launching after 1 month and making money straight away, but not all problems can be solved in such a short time.
By the way, it would take another 4 months to Frontend Robot to arrive to a point where it could be used in a real-world scenario.
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Maybe, you put too much to your MVP?
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As of today I still think that I couldn't have done it in less time. Yes probably I could've saved one month or two by optimizing a few things, but still, the problem to solve was complex. Real innovation requires effort.
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Real innovation requires effort.
That's right but most of the real innovations start from just simple, raw prototyping. Do you know about "design thinking"?-
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There is a nice discussion on this topic here: https://twitter.com/moeamaya/status/1120044560460083201
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Having worked many times in small teams or solo, I always missed the lack of focus on testing. Why? Because testing is expensive, creating tests is time consuming and bootstrapping a test suite requires days. In many instances, end-to-end testing is just ignored altogether.
However, having even a small test suite can make a HUGE difference and would allow to catch gross mistakes...if it only was quick and painless to have one.
I wanted a tool that would allow me to get started with end-to-end tests in minutes, not days. I wanted to focus on writing tests, not spending my time researching what tools to use or how to setup a test infrastructure.
That's how Frontend Robot was born.
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Looks like an awesome tool! Front end testing tools and frameworks can be such a pain to work with.
I have a few questions:
- how are tests created? Does it record user actions like clicks etc in the browser and then play them back automatically?
- can it do cross browser or cross platform testing? For example to automatically check it still works on safari on iPad?
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Hi @Create_Transmit, thanks for the question
- Tests are created mainly using what we call the "Live Editor". It's a completely new way of creating tests, it has the simplicity of a test recorder but you still retain a lot of control - and you don't need any plugin! Essentially you edit the test step by step, while a real test session is running in the background. You can see it in action in the first GIF on our homepage.
- Yes, it can do cross-browser testing. Under the hood we have Selenium, so tests can potentially run on almost every browser on any platform. However, at the moment only Chrome is available.
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Selenium is great but it's such a pain to work with in Windows. My business isn't currently at a stage where I could use this right now but I can see it would be great for collaboration with remote developers.
Im picturing:
- Several devs working on different features
- When a feature is competed and tested locally, each dev merges into a "testing" branch
- The testing branch is automatically deployed to a staging website where your tool can run the integration tests
Cross brower and device testing would be the killer feature for me.
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Sounds like a good plan! Let me know if you would like a demo when the time comes.
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I totally feel you. Testing is so important. Super curious to learn more about the tool.
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Well, I think the most wanted solution is apps and websites that test themselves.
As for me, I know the testing is very important but I don't like creating tests. I would be happy if my webapp just looks inside and create tests on its own!-
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That's interesting, I immediately thought about the Halting Problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem) :D. Although nowadays I imagine we could implement some basic prototype with ML starting from user patterns. But we are still far from it.
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Heh, right :)
Well, it's probably not about ML. But you really can the testing task easier with just "testing templates" (set of predefined actions that can be changed). For example, you could create a testing template for login/register pages because they are pretty standard.
Good luck!
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