Lecture 4

Question 1

How is end-2-end testing different from unit and integration testing?

Answer 1

It tests actual user scenarios by triggering a workflow, whereas unit/integration testing only tests single methods/actions

Question 2

What type of test often uses scenarios performed through a GUI?

Answer 2

End-2-end

Question 3

What is an example of a user scenario that can be tested on an ecommerce platform?

Answer 3

User logging in, browsing, adding to cart, paying for item

Question 4

What are the two different general approaches to GUI based test automation?

Answer 4

Recording and programmatic approach

Question 5

What are the downsides to the recording approach to GUI based test automation?

Answer 5

Limited scalability, customisation, harder to version control

Question 6

What are the downsides to the programmatic approach to GUI based test automation?

Answer 6

Initial setup slower, requires coding knowledge

Question 7

How does the inclusion of a GUI create challenges for end-2-end testing?

Answer 7

GUIs are updated often which tests need to keep up with. Working with a GUI are means there are requirements for the timing of input

Question 8

Apart from GUIs, what are end-2-end tests often relying on which can create challenges?

Answer 8

Databases or third-party APIs that can be unreliable or slow

Question 9

What are the most popular and well-established tools for end-2-end testing?

Answer 9

Selenium, Cypress, Playwright

Question 10

Which tool used for end-2-end testing uses the WebDriver API for automating web browsers?

Answer 10

Selenium. Communication between the browser and test code is HTTP which means they can be on different hosts.

Question 11

What is necessary for Selenium to find different HTML elements?

Answer 11

Defining locators

Question 12

What is XPath?

Answer 12

An example of a locator used by Selenium to find HTML elements

Question 13

What kind of testing is Selenium useful for?

Answer 13

Cross browser testing

Question 14

What is a popular approach to achieve better test design?

Answer 14

The Page Object Model (POM)

Question 15

What programming pattern for GUI automation involves creating a component representing an application page?

Answer 15

The Page Object programming pattern

Question 16

The Page Object is defined as a class with what two things?

Answer 16

-A list of graphics elements present
-A way to perform actions on the page

Question 17

True or false: in the Page Object Model, each page of a website becomes its own object.

Answer 17

False, a page is often divided logically into several objects. Header might be its own object and the search bar another.

Question 18

How does synchronisation cause problems in end-2-end testing?

Answer 18

Test code typically executes faster than application code and bad synchronisation can cause so called flaky tests because differences in response time that are unrelated to the test code

Question 19

What are the two options that Selenium offers to synchronise test code?

Answer 19

-Implicit wait: wait for x seconds
-Explicit wait: wait until element appears

Question 20

What is visual testing?

Answer 20

The automated process of validating the visual appearance of web pages or user interfaces

Question 21

Visual testing is seen as complementing what?

Answer 21

Functional testing

Question 22

What are the four key concepts in visual testing?

Answer 22

-Baseline images
-Snapshots
-Visual comparison
-Threshold (of difference)