TestCafe Studio End-To-End Web Testing IDE Review Tutorial

Here we present the TestCafe Studio Web Testing Tool Hands-on Review Tutorial:

In this post, we will provide answers to the following questions:

• Are you frustrated by the limitations of legacy web testing tools?
• Are you and your QA team looking for alternatives to products like Selenium?
• Do you need a web testing tool that is easy-to-use, reliable and free of cumbersome web drivers?

TestCafe Studio: The Enterprise Web Testing Platform

TestCafe Studio was created to deliver a testing platform that could help simplify the web testing process.

Their mission is to create a tool that is easy to set up and free of unnecessary complexity, that produces repeatable results for beginners and professionals alike and that can automatically generate test scripts and playback recordings with utmost reliability.

In this article, we will describe TestCafe Studio and why it’s the best choice for web testing.

We’ll detail the features of TestCafe Studio and demonstrate how you can create a working test for a complex web page in only 2 minutes.

Watch a Quick Video:

The Basics

TestCafe Studio is a cross-platform IDE for end-to-end web testing. It is powered by the TestCafe open-source framework and allows you to create, run, and maintain automated tests with zero code.

You can record tests visually within your favorite browser, edit scripts in its IDE-like interface, and execute tests across different browsers, platforms, and devices.

TestCafe Studio has been engineered from scratch for the modern web and browsers and does not rely upon Selenium or other legacy testing platforms.

TestCafe Studio was built for developers and QA engineers who want to simplify the testing process.

For beginners and those without coding experience, TestCafe Studio eliminates the need to manually generate test scripts. For experienced QA engineers and software developers, TestCafe Studio includes tools designed to increase productivity and reduce the time needed to test complex web applications.

Some Key Features of TestCafe Studio

As you know, the web testing marketplace includes multiple frameworks designed to emulate user activity and automate end-to-end web tests. Unfortunately, most of these tools require users to write a lot of boilerplate code and decipher complex configurations.

If you’re like us, though, be aware that even after you’ve written the boilerplate code and configured your browser, tests with legacy frameworks consistently produce inconsistent results (test execution is limited to a few browsers and a single platform).

To help address the inherent shortcomings of existing frameworks and allow you to spend less time writing/managing test scripts, TestCafe Studio ships with the following “must-have” features:

1) Fully Integrated Visual Web Test Recorder

TestCafe Studio’s Visual Test Recorder watches the action as you navigate and click through a webpage and generates test steps automatically. Without any additional work, these recorded steps can be used to quickly test the webpage across different desktop, mobile, and cloud platform browsers.

And unlike “pseudo-visual test recorders” that generate clumsy selectors that cannot reliably replay visually recorded tests, TestCafe Studio’s Visual Test Recorder is designed to produce consistent results, with reliable test playback.

2) Auto-Generated Element Selectors

Constructing the page element selectors that are used in actions or assertions is cumbersome, time-consuming, and error-prone.

If you’ve written test scripts in the past, you may be familiar with the overwhelming issues that confront legacy testing tools, those tools that ignore the need for auto-generated element selectors.

Unlike other tools, TestCafe Studio auto-generates selectors for each page element within a given test. It supports all the basic HTML elements and will support shadow DOM and HTML5 inputs with native pop-up editors in a future release.

To cover the broadest possible test scenarios, TestCafe Studio generates an optimal element selector and a set of alternatives. If you have to click a button, you can select it in the test using its caption, just like a user would do.

However, if your goal is to verify that the correct caption is displayed, you can use the ID or class name to identify the button.

In addition, in an upcoming update, you will be able to rank element identifiers like attributes, tag names, or text content (TestCafe Studio will generate selectors based on your preferred identifiers).

Of course, you are free to manually edit TestCafe’s auto-generated selectors as needs dictate. You can even create selectors from scratch. TestCafe Studio’s Selector Constructor was designed to put control in your hands.

3) Cross-Platform and Cross-Browser Tests

TestCafe Studio is a cross-platform application that works on macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Test files/scripts are platform-agnostic: regardless of where they’ve been recorded, tests can be executed on multiple OS platforms, devices (desktop/mobile), cloud testing services (like BrowserStack or SauceLabs), and continuous integration systems (including CircleCI, Bitbucket, Azure, TeamCity, Jenkins, Travis, GitLab, etc.)

You can record tests in any major desktop browser, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Edge. Irrespective of the browser used to record a script, those tests will run on all modern web browsers without hiccups.

TestCafe Studio’s platform and browser agnostic approach to web testing allows it to capture platform and browser-specific bugs quickly and ensure that your web app delivers the same user experience across browsers/devices.

4) No Additional Tools to Maintain

TestCafe Studio does not require Selenium/WebDriver or any browser plugins or third-party add-ons. One immediate advantage of this self-contained architecture is efficiency.

With TestCafe Studio, you can begin testing as soon as the product is installed. There is no need to look around for drivers and plugins.

Perhaps more important is TestCafe’s independent system. Once a new major version of your favorite browser is released, you can be assured that existing web tests will not fail because of missing plugins or add-ons.

With TestCafe Studio, you won’t need to wait for third-party developers to address issues caused by browser or system updates.

TestCafe Studio and your favorite web browser are all you need to record and execute web tests.

5) Built-in Wait Mechanism

Web software tests are asynchronous by nature. User actions rarely produce immediate results, especially if those actions are accompanied by roundtrips to the server or by integrated animation effects.

With legacy web testing tools, QA engineers are asked to handle these asynchronous events by manually pausing the test engine to prevent test errors. Needless to say, this boilerplate “wait” code (designed to overcome the limitations of the testing tool itself) is quite difficult to maintain and prone to failure.

However, as you know, inserting that “wait” code represents the reality for nearly all legacy web testing tools.

TestCafe Studio handles asynchronous operations a little differently. Before each action or assertion, it automatically waits for the target element to become available (loaded, visible, not obscured by another element, etc.).

To ensure the utmost reliability, TestCafe Studio automatically executes an assertion if a given condition is not met during the first attempt.

TestCafe Studio allows you to focus on user actions and it eliminates the need to write complicated, boilerplate code designed to address the shortcomings of legacy testing platforms.

Create a Web Test in 2 Minutes with TestCafe Studio

In this 2-minute demo, you will see how to use TestCafe Studio to test a webpage with integrated file upload capabilities.

We will select and upload two files, and then run two assertions, one for correct file name output and another for proper file size label format. With TestCafe Studio’s Visual Test Recorder, we’ll only need a couple of minutes to create and execute that test.

Step #1) Launch TestCafe Studio, enter the website URL within its Welcome screen and click “Start Recording a Test’.

Your browser will navigate to the specified address, and while the Visual Test Recorder is up and running in the background, you’ll be ready to record your interaction with the webpage.

Use the Upload mode drop-down to specify that you want to start file upload manually.

Enable the checkbox that allows uploading multiple files.

Click Select File and make a selection.

Click Upload.

Step #2) Switch to TestCafe Studio to view the commands generated by your actions.

Step 3) This example’s UI is rendered in an IFRAME, so the first action is the context switch. Click and upload the steps to follow, replicating your actions.

Let’s finalize the test with a couple of assertions. We will first check whether the demo app displays the correct file name.

Once again, you don’t have to write a single line of code. Click the  icon to add an assertion with an “equals” condition.

Then use the button to pick the target element interactively in the browser.

This focuses on the browser window so you can point to the required element.

TestCafe Studio will generate a selector for this element and open a list of its properties. Select the property you wish to assert.

TestCafe Studio retrieves the current property value and can confirm that you want to use it for comparison.

Step 4) In a similar way, you can assert a label’s font-size CSS property value.

Step 5) The test is now ready and you can stop the recording. To run the test, hit the Run button and watch TestCafe replay your actions.

Step #6) Once the test run is complete, review the test report for results.

That’s it. In just a couple of minutes and without any code, we created a test that is ready to run across different browsers, on different platforms, in a CI system, locally, or on BrowserStack.

Conclusion

TestCafe Studio is a very fast, lightweight and effective automation platform. It does not require a WebDriver or any browser plugin to start.

You can simply install it and start creating end-to-end tests with a visual test recorder without writing any test code.

You can use web testing tools and compare TestCafe Studio with your current web testing platform to see the difference. Let us know if you have any questions while using this tool. We would love to hear your feedback.