Let the Engineers Speak! Part 5: Audience Q&A

Andy Knight (moderator):

So our first question comes from Jonathan Nathan.

Can Playwright or Cypress handle multiple browser tabs? What do engineers in these tools do for Azure authentication or target new links?

Gleb Bahmutov (Cypress):

[It’s a] very specific kind of interesting question, right? Multiple tabs and Azure authentication. You must have both. I think Playwright is [a] better tool, because it supports multiple browser tabs control right out of the box. So I would go with that.

Carter Capocaccia (Cypress):

Can I share a hack for this real quick?

Andy Knight (moderator):

Sure.

Carter Capocaccia (Cypress):

So I’m going to share the way that you don’t have to deal with multiple browser tabs in Cypress. And that’s just, you change the DOM from a target blank to a target self and then it just opens in the same window. So if you have to use Cypress [and] you need to get around multiple browser tabs, you can do DOM manipulation with Cypress.

Andy Knight (moderator):

Man, it sounds kind of hacky, though.

Carter Capocaccia (Cypress):

No, I mean it’s absolutely right. Yeah, it’s hacky.

Andy Knight (moderator):

So I got a question then. Is that like a feature request anyone has lifted up for Cypress? Or is that just because of the way the Cypress app itself is designed that that’s just a non-starter?

Gleb Bahmutov (Cypress):

It’s an open issue. Cypress team says it’s not a priority. Because you think about two tabs, right? Two tabs that present communication between one user and another of a backend. So you always want to kind of stop that and control it so you don’t have to actually have two windows. You want to control one window and communicate with API calls on the back. At least that’s the Cypress team opinion. So we might not see it any time soon.

Andy Knight (moderator):

Yeah. I know in Playwright like, Gleb, like you said, it is really easy and nice because you have a browser instance. Then in that instance, you have multiple browser contexts and then, from each browser context, you’re going to have multiple pages. So yeah, I love it. Love it.

Tally Barak (Playwright):

And the better thing is that you can have one of them, like in a mobile size or emulating a mobile device and the other one in web. So if you want to run a test of like cutting between two different users, each one is incognito and is a complete browser context. They don’t share their local storage or anything. So basically, you can run any test that you want on the thing. And because of the browser, it also works really fast. Because it’s not really launching a whole browser. It’s just launching a browser context, which is much, much faster than launching the whole browser.

Andy Knight (moderator):

Awesome. Alright, let’s move on to our next question here. This is from Sundakar.

Many of the customers I worked with are preferring open source. And do you think Applitools will have its place in this open source market?

Can I answer this one? Because I work for Applitools.

For this one, I think absolutely yes. I mean all of Applitools Eyes SDKs are open source. What Applitools provides is not only just the mechanism for visual testing, but also the platforms. We work with all the open source tools, frameworks, you name it. So absolutely, I would say there’s a place here. Let me move on to the next question.

Gleb Bahmutov (Cypress):

Andy, before you move on, can I add? So my computer science PhD is in computer vision image processing. So it’s all about comparing new images, teaching them, and so on. I would not run my own visual testing service, right? My goal is to make sure I’m testing [the] web application. Keeping images, comparing them, showing the diffs, updating it. It’s such a hassle, it’s not worth it, my time. Just pay for a service like Applitools and move on with your life.

Andy Knight (moderator):

Awesome. Thank you. Okay. Let me pull the next question here. This is from Daniel.

I heard a lot that Playwright is still a new framework with a small community even when it was released in January of 2020 but never heard that about WebdriverIO. As far as I know, Playwright is older.

I don’t think that is true. I’d have to double check.

Tally Barak (Playwright):

No, I don’t think [so].

Andy Knight (moderator):

Is Playwright still considered new?

Tally Barak (Playwright):

It’s newer than the others. But it’s growing really fast. I mean, because I’m the [Playwright] OG, I remember the time when I would mention Playwright and no one had any idea what I’m talking about. It was very, very new. This is not the case anymore. I mean, there’s still, of course, people don’t really hear about it, but the community has grown a lot. I think [it has] over 40,000 stars on GitHub. The Slack channel has almost 5,000 participants or something. So the community is growing, Playwright is growing really, really nicely. And you’re welcome to join.

Andy Knight (moderator):

Okay, here’s another question from Ryan Barnes.

Do y’all integrate automated tests with a test case management tool? If so, which ones?

Gleb Bahmutov (Cypress):

Yes. TestRail.

Andy Knight (moderator):

TestRail. Okay.

Gleb Bahmutov (Cypress):

Because we are not the only testing tool, right? Across organizations, where our teams, our tools, and manual testing. So we need a central testing portal.

Tally Barak (Playwright):

No, we are not perfect. And we should. Any good ideas are welcome.

Carter Capocaccia (Cypress):

So we don’t have a formalized test manager tool. But if anybody has ever used any kind of Atlassian tooling – there’s, you know, JIRA out there has the idea of a test set ticket inside of the test set or individual test. You can define user flows inside of there. So I guess you can consider that a test management tool. It’s a little bit less featured than something like TestRail. Actually, it’s a lot less featured than something like TestRail. But you know, that’s how we stay organized. So we basically tie our tests to a ticket. That’s how we can manage, you know, well what is this ticket test? What is it supposed to be testing? Where is our source of truth?

Andy Knight (moderator):

I guess I could launch a somewhat controversial question here, but I’ll do it rhetorically not to answer. But if you have a test automation solution, do you really need to have it export results to a test case management tool? Or can you just use the reports it gives you? We’ll leave that for offline. So the next one on the list here is from Sindhuja.

We are trying to convert our test scripts from Protractor.

Okay. Wow, that’s a blast from the past.

We are doing [a] proof of concept and WebdriverIO and we have issues with running in Firefox and WebdriverIO. Is there any notes in WebdriverIO with cross browsers?

Jose, got any insights for us here?

Jose Morales (WebdriverIO):

Yeah, absolutely. So one thing that I really love about WebdriverIO is the easy configuration. So, when you create a project in WebdriverIO, you have a JSON file where you put all the configuration about capability services, what browser you want to use. And you can easily add your own configuration. It could be, for example, if you want to run in Firefox or in Edge or you want to run on Source Labs, you have several options.
So it is really easy to integrate configuration for Firefox. You only need to specify the browser in the capability section along with the version and special features like size view. If you want to know how to do that, it’s very easy. You can go to my home page. And there [are] examples where you can build something from scratch and you can see easily where to add that particular configuration. And I’m going to share with you some repositories in GitHub where you can see some examples [of] how to do it.

Andy Knight (moderator):

Thank you so much, Jose. Oh, here we go.

Which framework would be the best platform to test both Android and iOS apps?

I know most of us [are] focused on web UI, so here’s a curveball: mobile.

Gleb Bahmutov (Cypress):

I can say that at Mercari US, we picked Detox after using Appium for a long time. But for new React Native projects, we went with Detox.

Carter Capocaccia (Cypress):

Yeah, Detox is the only one that I’ve ever used it for as well. And it was really, really good. I found no reason to switch. I think, Gleb, can you correct me if I’m wrong on this? I think Detox was originally made by Wix? Is it, Wix, the company?

Gleb Bahmutov (Cypress):

That’s correct. Yes.

Carter Capocaccia (Cypress):

Yes, so Wix used to make Detox. I think it’s still maintained by them, but it was like an in-house tool  they open sourced, and now it’s really good.

Andy Knight (moderator):

Awesome. Cool. I hadn’t heard. I’ll have to look it up. Alrighty, well I think that’s about all the time we have for question and answer today. I want to say thank you to everyone for attending. Thank you to all of our speakers here on the panel.