You’re a Web developer. How many times have you pushed some minor change to production only to break your website? We’ve all been there, right? Well, when you use DevExpress TestCafe, you can avoid those situations and weird user-experience glitches.
“Websites and Web applications are really easy to mess up because it’s so easy to change them,” said Julian Bucknall, CTO of DevExpress. “You either have to hire a QA person to ensure everything still works, or you automate the process.”

TestCafe makes automated functional testing easy. With it, developers can start recording their first tests in less than five minutes because the installer automatically configures the environment. It runs in any browser that supports HTML5, and it is operating-system-agnostic. With TestCafe, tests can run on remote computers and mobile devices, in the background on any machine, and in multiple browsers and on multiple machines in parallel.

“Browsers generally have a subset of HTML, JavaScript and CSS that they support, so a change may look great in one browser and be broken in another,” said Bucknall.

No Coding Required
TestCafe is 100% Web-based and loads in the same browser that’s being tested against. There’s no need to load additional tools or switch between browsers during test recording. Any end-user action can be easily recorded without having to write code. In addition, the test steps can be reordered, re-recorded or deleted.

Developers who prefer white-box testing can access the JavaScript code behind their tests since TestCafe provides direct access to DOM. It allows any element on a page to be accessed and JavaScript functions to be reused. The integrated code editor includes syntax highlighting so a test can be modified in code instead of the Visual Recorder.

Rather than recreating an end-user problem, TestCafe generates a URL that can be sent to the end user so she can reproduce the issue on her machine. TestCafe captures the end user’s actions and automatically creates a new regression test, withing requiring the end user to have a license.

Forget Plug-ins
TestCafe is a plug-in-free testing environment. Traditional HTML5 Web testing tools require browser plug-ins to record and/or execute tests. When plug-ins are required, the plug-in for each browser tested must be included, and it may contain bugs. Later, when the browsers are updated, the plug-in may fail to work properly, so one must ignore the new browser or wait for a tool vendor to create an updated plug-in. When the new plug-in arrives, it needs to be installed on all of the test machines. In short, installing and maintaining a vast array of plug-ins can be a waste of time.

“TestCafe has an automatic proxy, so it insinuates itself between the browser and Web server which is serving up HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It does all the work,” said Bucknall. “With TestCafe, you can focus on testing functionality rather than the current status of individual plug-ins.”

Because there are no plug-ins to install or configure, and apps can be tested on different versions of the same browser, there is no need to install a complete test environment.

Pure Web-based Testing Environment
TestCafe was engineered from the ground up as a fully optimized Web testing tool for Web developers and QA engineers, so it has no baggage or legacy code that restricts the testing of Web applications across all major HTML5 browsers, as well as on the desktop and mobile devices.

With TestCafe, the entire QA process can be managed within a browser locally or on remote computers. Once a single instance of TestCafe is installed on server, it can be accessed from anywhere in the world without requiring configuration or remote server licenses.

TestCafe’s code structure is designed to be human readable, and it is written in JavaScript, so tests are as clean and simple as possible. Each line corresponds to an end-user action without any cycles or branches. And instead of writing code to handle all the browser complexities, such as waiting for elements to load, scrolling the page to make the element visible, or manually determining whether the element is actually visible, TestCafe does all that automatically.

A Simple, Powerful API
APIs are often overly complex or under-documented. TestCafe’s API is simple, intuitive and easy to understand, yet it provides all the functionality one would expect. All tests are executed within the browser as common JavaScript code, providing full access to any standard JavaScript/DOM API. And, there’s no need to write lots of boilerplate code to prepare the test environment, because TestCafe does all that automatically.

“TestCafe ensures that your website or Web app does what you expect it to do so you’re not surprised by the changes you’re making,” said Bucknall.

Learn more and download your free trial at testcafe.devexpress.com.

This article is sponsored by DevExpress.