A Short Introduction to Cypress

Though the world of web development has transformed over the years through advanced libraries and frameworks, the world of testing seems to struggle with the pace.

You are probably familiar with how writing robust passing test cases is more challenging than creating the features themselves. Cypress wants to revolutionize this.

It is an end-to-end testing tool built from the ground up that lets us focus on building things rather than fixing flaky, unreliable tests. It combines multiple tools, such as a framework or an assertion library into one single tool.

Since it is open source, Cypress has the advantage of evolving quickly, and with a large community behind it. This tool has all the necessary features we need to build tests with ease and confidence.

It comes with a powerful API and a powerful test runner as well. Looking back, the way Cypress executes our test cases in real-time makes it easier to debug and address a failing test.

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What the course covers

In the next couple of lessons, we are going to look into:

• Who should use Cypress?
• Where can you find great resources if you are stuck? Thanks to its thriving ecosystem.
• What Cypress wants to achieve, and where the tool is heading.

Once we know all the whys and hows, we can look into Cypress itself and learn:

1. How Cypress works
2. The core features of the tool
3. How to set it up
4. How tests are structured
5. How to write robust, deterministic test cases
6. How to integrate Axe, the accessibility engine
7. How to execute our test cases in different environments
8. How to debug any issues with our test cases

As you can see from the test runner in the image above, Cypress provides a lot of information. We will cover this in the upcoming lessons. In the next lesson, we’ll explore whether Cypress is the right tool for you.