Overview

Before we start to get into more practical topics we should first get familiar with the various moving parts of end-to-end testing and Frontend Robot.

What’s Frontend Robot? What’s end-to-end testing?

End-to-end testing refers to the practice of testing the flow through a system from the perspective of a potential end user. From a business point of view, this is probably the most important and comprehensive type of test that can be performed on a system. Why? Because it tests a system from the only perspective that matters from a business point of view, which is the perspective of the user.

Frontend Robot allows you to create end-to-end tests for websites and web applications in a simple way without writing any code. It allows to test a website as if there was a real user, behind a real browser.

Test Case

A test case (also known as just Test) is a set of steps that verifies that a particular user flow works as expected.

A test contains an ordered list of steps. Each test step can be an action - which simulates an actual user action such as clicking on a button or typing on the keyboard - or an assertion - which is a check to verify that a condition is met, such as checking if an element on the page exists.

As a best practice, each test case should cover only one specific user flow.

Test Suite

A test suite is a collection of test cases.

In Frontend Robot each test case must be part of a test suite.

A list of all the test suites present in your account can be found in your organization’s dashboard (or homepage).

Standard Test Editor

One of the main features of Frontend Robot is the ability to create tests without writing code. That’s possible thanks to a user interface which allows to edit a test step in an intuitive way.

Each test step is a combination of an instruction (e.g. Click, Send keys, etc.) and one or more parameters depending on the type of the instruction. For example the Click instruction has one parameter which is the CSS selector of the element of the page to click on.

For a basic interactive tutorial on CSS selectors you can check CSS Diner

The Standard Editor of Frontend Robot provides a quick and convenient interface to edit steps using a combination of instructions and parameters.

Live Test Editor

In addition to the Standard Test Editor, Frontend Robot provides another more intuitive way to create and edit a test case. We call it the Live Editor. As the name suggests the Live Editor allows the user to edit a test while it’s running.

Test Fragment

Fragments are set of steps that can be shared across multiple test cases. They are useful to define user flows that are most commonly used such as a login sequence.