The controversy
People ask me every day: is Cypress a good tool? Is Playwright better? Why do I need to pay for parallelization and the cloud? I got so tired of answering these questions again and again, while Cypress.io-the-company does nothing to address it that I posted my opinion publicly. Here is the screenshot:
The Test Runner
Two weeks ago I had the good fortune to speak about Cypress and Playwright testing tools at RefactorDX conference. I really like the declarative syntax Cypress uses to describe the tests. Here are my slides for “Do Not Fight Your Testing Tools”, and below is the video of the talk.
Let me know if you have any feedback on the presentation.
Cypress AND Playwright
So what does it leave you, the tester and developer? I believe you will be effective if you know how to use both Cypress and Playwright to write E2E, API, and component tests. This is why I am finally starting to release lessons for my new course “Cypress vs Playwright“. Here is the announcement video:
Bonus: if you have taken any of my other courses, you know that you can ask me questions and I will add more lessons to answer them.
Cypress-The-Company
Yeah, Cypress.io is working from what I hear on debugging tests better in CI environments. I don’t think they will make a solution good enough to change things long-term. Nope, I don’t think they will quickly iterate on the solution in response to the initial feedback. Yup, it will be like Cypress v12 retryable chains of commands. It is a big deal. It is still broken after 8 (eight!) months. This seems to be typical for Cypress open source test runner: a nice feature is released, and I find problems, but they remain open without any movement to resolve them.
Ohh, and one more nice touch. Lately, I have been receiving automated bot emails closing my issues due to inactivity.
As you might guess, I have reported a lot of issues to the Test Runner.
Since I used to maintain the test runner, all issues that I open are well-defined. I am trying to help. Even the above closed issue relates to … the parallelization calculator paid feature!
Ohh the irony; not addressing issues about your paid service… Do you think I would be reporting much after most of the previously opened issues were closed without any attention?
Performance and Security Testing
This blog post is not using Cypress, but I looked into web performance testing using Lighthouse and described everything discovered in a nice blog post: Trying Lighthouse.
Using Cypress test runner to test against Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks was a dream of mine for a looooong time. Now it is possible, and I wrote how to do it: CSP Testing Using Cypress
Of course, there are my new Cypress blog posts and videos from the past month, even as I took a little break.
Chelsea Game
This week was special: we took a train to Philadelphia with my son and saw Chelsea vs Brighton & Hove Albion's friendly game. My son is a huge Chelsea fan and for us to sit up close to Sterling, Silva, Nkunku, Mudryk, and the rest of the Blues was a magical time.
Great time, a beautiful game, Chelsea won 4:3. This is what matters the most at the end of the day: time with your family and friends.
Update 1:
Ooops, the issue about the broken query chain in Cypress v12 will be closed automatically.
What kind of a project does this?