What Is Front end Testing?

What Is Front end Testing?

Front Testing

Front-end Testing is testing Graphical User Interface (GUI), functionality and usability of website or application.

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For Example: If you enter your name into the frontend of application, numbers should not be accepted. Another example would be checking the alignment of GUI elements.

The main aim of Frontend testing is to ensure frontend is defect free with successive updates. Apart from this Frontend testing is conducted for:

•    CSS Regression Testing: Minor CSS changes that break the frontend layout

•    Changes to JS files that make the frontend non-functional

•    Performance Checks

How To Create A Frontend Website Testing Plan?

Creating a Frontend testing plan is a simple 4 step process.

Step 1) Find out tools for Managing Your Test Plan

Step 2) Decide the budget for Front End Testing

Step 3) Set the timeline for the entire process

Step 4) Decide the entire scope of the project. The scope includes the following items

•    OS and browsers used by users ISP plans of your audience

•    Popular devices used by the audience

•    Proficiency of your audience

•    Internet correction speed of the audience

Why Create a Frontend Testing Plan?

1.    Browsers

2.    Operating Systems

Your project needs to cover. There are innumerable combinations of Browsers and OS that you could test your front end on. Having a plan will help you reduce the testing effort and money.

By creating frontend testing, plan you will get following advantages-

1.    It helps you to get the complete clarity about the scope of the project

2.    Performing frontend testing also gives confidence in deploying the project

Tips for Better Frontend Testing

Here are some important tips that you need to follow to create a better frontend testing plan:

•    Prepare your budget, resources and time judiciously.

•    Use a headless browser, so tests are executed faster.

•    Cut down the amount of DOM rendering in tests for speedier execution.

•    Isolate test cases, so root cause of the bug is determined quickly for a faster defect fix cycle

•    Make use your test scripts reusable for faster regression cycles.

•    You should use a consistent naming convention for your test scripts

Front-End Testing Tools

JS testing tool:

1. Jasmine

It is a is a behavior-driven development framework to test JavaScript code. The tool focuses more on the business value than on the technical details. It has a clean syntax which helps you to write tests easily. It does not depend on any other JavaScript frameworks. It is heavily influenced by unit testing frameworks, such as JSSpec, ScrewUnit, JSpec, and RSpec.

Functional testing tool:

2. Selenium

Selenium is a frontend testing tool. It performs end to end testing across various browsers & platforms like Mac, Windows, Mac, and Linux. It allows you to write tests in different programming languages like Java, PHP, C#, etc. The tool offers record and playback features to write tests without a need to learn Selenium IDE.

Cross-Browser Testing Tool:

3. Browsera

Browsers are an online cross-browser testing tool. It works on Windows and Mac OS X platform. The tool helps to find cross-browser layout issues by comparing each browser’s output. After completion of the test, every JavaScript errors are reported and collected. The tool also offers the site crawling feature which is helpful in testing all the pages of the site.

CSS tool:

4. Needle

The needle is a Front testing tool for testing CSS. It checks that visuals elements like font/CSS/images render correctly by taking screenshots of certain portions of your website. After that, the tool compares with some known good screenshots. It also allows testers to calculated CSS values and the position of HTML elements.

You need to be aware of the following two primary challenges for any frontend testing tool-

1.    Test Automation requires plenty of efforts at the initial stage. Therefore, it needs more time and efforts.

2.    Test Tools may have some compatibility issues with Operating Systems and browsers.

Front-End Performance Optimization

Front-end performance testing checks “How fast does page loads.”

Optimizing the front-end performance for a single user is a good practice before testing an application with high user loads.

Why Is Front-End Performance Optimization Important?

Earlier performance optimization meant optimizing server-side. That is because most of the websites were mostly static and most of the processing was done on the server side.

However, with the beginning of Web 2.0 technologies, web applications become more dynamic. As a result, the client-side code has become a performance hog.

What is the Benefit of Front-End Performance Optimization?

•    In website testing, apart from server bottlenecks finding the client side performance issues are equally important as they easily impact the user’s experience.

•    Improving back-end performance by 50% will increase the overall performance of the application by 10%.

•    However, improving front-end performance by 50% will increase the overall performance of the application by 40%.

•    Moreover, front-end performance optimization is easy and cost-effective as compared to the back-end.

Front-end Performance Testing Tools

Page Speed

Page speed is an open source performance testing add-on launched by Google. The tool evaluates the web page and provides suggestions to minimize loading time. It makes web page retrieval quicker when users access web pages using Google search engine.

YSlow

YSlow is a frontend web performance testing tool. It analyzes web page performance by examining all the components on the page, including components created by using JavaScript. It also measures the page’s performance and offers suggestions to the users.

Conclusion

•    Front-end Testing is testing or verifying the frontend functionality, GUI, and Usability.

•    The main aim of Frontend testing to make sure that every user is well-protected from bugs.

•    Creating a front-end testing plan helps you to know the devices, browsers, and systems which your project need to cover.

•    It also helps you to get the complete clarity about the scope of the project

•    Jasmine, Selenium, Browser, TestComplete, Needle are some of the examples of Frontend testing tool.