To ensure a seamless experience with the products, the development team needs to incorporate front-end testing in their workflow. Slow loading speed and some other performance issues like high bandwidth consumption can be deal-breakers. In this, you will get to everything related to front end testing as an integral part of the quality assurance efforts and overall experience of the development lifecycle.
What Is Front-End Testing?
Front end testing is a technique of testing where graphical user interface and usability of web applications or software are tested, and the main motive of front end testing is to test overall functionalities to ensure the presentation layer of web applications. It also provides software defect-free with the subsequent updates.
Front end testing is testing which ensures to check the presentation layer of a three-tier architecture. You can check the Graphical user interface on the screen. For a web application, front end testing also involves checking functionalities like forms, graphs and reports. Front end testing is a term which covers a variety of testing strategies. A tester needs to be a good understanding of business requirements so that it can perform this type of testing efficiently.
What is the need for Front End Testing?
Here you will get to know how front end testing improves the functionality and overall performance of the web-based applications.
- Many developers place a focus on optimized functionalities within the server only of the application. It is essential as front end testing enables QA teams to evaluate the product from a user point of view. Front end test’s development teams can also pinpoint the issues on the client-side to make sure that they do not jeopardize the critical workflows in the application.
- Front end testing system plays a significant role when it matters to verify the behaviour of the web applications on several different operating systems and browsers or even on any devices. This helps to validate the functioning and responsiveness of the application over various system architectures.
- This testing is essential since advancements in client-side development coupled with the modifications in the browser technologies. That leads to compatibility issues.
- Front end testing is necessary to create a website or application that renders across different devices and browser engines.
- Front end testing ensures to improve the quality of user interaction and experience. It also helps to develop the teams to give the user a better experience by optimizing the performance benchmarks.
- It enables users to reduce the application load time and to make sure the content of the application is visible correctly. This gives more interface with a unified look across several devices and browsers.
- Front end testing improves the client-side elements by increasing the quality of applications exponentially. Front end testing enables users to enjoy a better and consistent experience across different environments.
- It makes sure that seamless integration of the third party services. Many modern applications rely on third-party integration at some point, and now the software as service platforms are increasing day by day. Poor performance can lead to compromise when you need to integrate another service to your applications.
- If the user interacts with your application, then it may cause substantial damage to the user experience. For that, front end tests are indispensable for anyone who are looking to integrate third-party services to a web application.
- For user and rankings algorithms on the search engine, factors like usability, page loading speed are crucial. Low performance can hurt the lead or revenue generation channels when the workflow is critical. Fusion tends to test allow workflow speed to function correctly.
- A subtle error on the front end testing of your application can cause irreversible damage, and turning a blind eye can ruin the expensive performance. Make sure to notice the flaws in the system before end users do.
The critical role of Front End Tests for Web Applications:
Modern web interfaces are increasing its popularity. Front end testing keeps getting richer and offers more advanced functionality with great interaction possibilities. This is all possible due to the significant part of JavaScript, which is the language of the web. There is a lot happening on the client-side in this modern application, and so there is a lot that may go wrong. Front end testing prevents the error, which warrants a lot of testing, mostly automated testing.
Determining the Most Crucial Front End Elements:
Front end testing mainly involves testing dozens of user interface elements which includes graphics, visible texts and layout as well as some functional aspects like buttons and links. The testing procedure includes identifying how quickly these features load and how the user’s actions are responsive.
To detect the most crucial front end features for testing purposes, make sure to assign the priorities to the elements. This you can start by ensuring the introductory text and page loads correctly. This also ensures the functional elements are visible and responsive.
Ensure the application loads asynchronously and make sure that neither user interface elements wait for another to load for it to be visible to the users.
Increase the load on the application in a way that it reflects concurrent access and multiple user requests to the systems. You can also limit available memory and connection speed on the client system.
Make sure to adjust the front end to improve the performance in everyday use cases.
What are the Types of Front End Testing?
Front end testing is a broad concept which encompasses several testing strategies. This section takes a peek into the most common types.
Unit Testing
Unit testing is done at the lowest level of the software testing service pipeline. The unit test is the implication which things outside the code go under test and eliminate. Unit tests should not include any types of dependencies on external systems. The unit test validates the behavior of the system. By missing a single unit test can cause further testing procedure more challenging, and the impact of system failures will have higher magnitude and more likely it will help to prevent the program from operating together.
Unit testing involves testing of individual units like input validations, calculations, and many other UI element actions to make sure that they function correctly. A programmer writes unit test to verify the relatively small piece of code doing what it is intended to do. A unit test is narrow in scope, and it should be simple to write and execute. By ensuring that the units function correctly as independent entities provide development teams assurances that they will operate as intended when built into more extensive front end features. The effectiveness of unit tests depends on what the programmer considers to be useful. The unit tests are beneficial for programmer ad; they are not directly applicable to anyone else. This testing procedure saves time and also simplifies the development process. If the unit test does their work, then the testers and users both downstream are benefitted from seeing fewer bugs.
The unit test mainly tests the internal consistency as opposed to prove that it plays accurately with an external system.
The primary role of unit testing
- Unit tests find bugs in the development cycle and also allow introducing bugs and system defects early during the development procedure.
- In this way unit tests resolve the issues of the development team before integrating the units and impacting as a whole system.
- The logs of the unit tests provide the project team with an explained description of the system on micro-level, and this method helps to improve the interchangeability within the groups so that any newcomer can rely on logs provided by peers to be more familiar with the development system.
- Mainly in simple words, it can be said that unit testing logs as documentation.
- Unit test offers a solid base framework to understand and control APIs.
- The unit test helps to improve code reusability as the revised unit tests are correctly tested.
- When the development team misses out on unit testing, then the odds of reusing buggy code and spawning numerous systems fails and that leads to future changes dramatically.
- Developers can be confident that the bugs or compilation issues by testing the units beforehand.
- The written code fulfils the function as per the specification requirements.
Visual Regression Testing
The primary purpose of visual regression testing is to verify that changes to the source code do not have any unforeseen consequences. This is a widespread occurrence in software development, and by this, you can change one thing and unintentionally break something else in the procedure.
When it is about visual regression testing, then we are concerned with preventing unintentional changes to the application’s visuals. When the style of the button components is changed, then we will be sure about not messing with the type of our button group. Visual regression testing is the most common strategy for this sort of assertion. It is very unique to the front end as it focuses on the code and it compares the interface of the application with the corresponding version as expected in the staging or production environment.
Visual regression testing is done by comparing multiple screenshots that are captured within a headless browser, and a testing tool also supports image comparison. It is used to inspect the difference between the snapshots.
Integration Testing
A wide array of microservices powers in many modern applications. An integration test is widely used for a wide variety of things from full-on system tests against surroundings which are created to represent production to any difficulty which uses a resource that is not mocked. Integration testing makes sure to meet the requirements of connectivity specified by the testing plan between modules. Integration testing figures out the interface errors that occur during integration testing.
While performing an integration test, both functional and non-functional interface components are validated. If the interaction between the service is not tested, then it can potentially ruin the experience of users. An integration test can be a JUnit test at the lower end of the spectrum in which a repository is exercised against an in-memory database towards the upper end of the system and the difficulty verifying applications can easily exchange messages. By operating integration tests ensures that the communication between the application’s interface and API works smoothly.
Integration test always makes sure that the synchronization between modules, and it helps project teams to make sure the software modules can work with no other defects simultaneously. It is fully synchronized with each other. Integration tests provide insight into the combinational behavior of the various systems elements which are tightly coupled to each other. When the series of integration tests is completed, then the testing team should have full confidence in the operation of the software’s interface. Integration testing fixes exception handling defects which are very important for high assurance systems.
Acceptance Testing
Acceptance testing is a type of software testing where a system is tested for acceptability and evaluates the system’s compliance with the requirements of the business. This testing is very formal testing with respect to the needs of the users and requirements of users to determine whether a system satisfies the acceptance criteria or not. This testing enables users to authorize the entity to determine the acceptance of the system.
Acceptance testing is a technique of performing to determine if the software system has met its required specifications. The main motive of acceptance testing is to evaluate the system’s compliance with the business requirements and to verify if it has met all the criteria necessary to deliver to end-users. Acceptance testing ensures that the final model of the application works appropriately as expected by the users.
There are several forms of acceptance testing:
User acceptance Testing
This test can determine the product is working for the user not or adequately. Specific requirements of users are primarily picked for testing purposes and also termed as End User Testing.
Business Acceptance Testing
This test can determine whether the product meets the business goals or not. Business acceptance testing mainly focuses on business profits. These are very challenging because of the changing market conditions and modern technologies. Thus, the current implementation may need to change that results in extra budgets.
Alpha Testing
This test can determine the product in the development testing environment by an expertise testers team.
Beta Testing
Beta testing can assess the product by exposing it to the end-users and also helps to enhance the work to a rich user experience.
Cross-Browser Testing
Users encounter situations where they try to open a website by receiving a notification that the website does not support the browser which they are using. Sometimes the website does not function and works correctly. For that, cross-browser testing makes sure a web application works as expectations in several browsers. This test includes the procedure of verifying compatibility, which involves running the same set of test cases repeatedly on several browsers and making it easy to automate.
Front End Testing vs. Back End Testing
Back end testing is the type of software tests which testers perform on the business logic and database layers of a web application. Before the end, tester validates the application user interface in a three-tier architecture. In many cases, the development teams perform back end tests in the early stages. While QA experts perform front end testing to check the input fields, links, buttons, submit forms and many other user interface elements. Back end testing is for checking the features which end users cannot see.
If you are testing or any complex applications like ERP systems, then back end testing can identify common problems in the server-side. Backend testing checks the database for several elements which include the schemes, CRUD operations, ACID properties and business rule conformance. It also provides security and performance.
How to Create Better Front-End Tests?
Before ending this, here are some strategies on how to write excellent front end tests. Start your testing strategy with end to end testing. It will give you feedback that most closely resembles the experience of real users.
Read more: Regression Test Plan: A checklist for Quality Assurance
Conclusion
The guide, as mentioned above, will help to gain all essential information related to front end testing. The purpose of Front-end testing is to check the functionality and usability of the application. It usually involves many validating menus, forms, and other elements that are visible to the end-users. Front end testing allows to check the alignment of the GUI and to verify the input fields. Make sure to perform front end testing on the application before reflecting it to the real users.
