Mastering End-to-End Testing: 8 Best Practices for Flawless Results

E2E Testing Example

Applications must be continuously available and perform optimally to meet the customers’ ever-growing expectations. Software testing methodologies must evolve to keep up with the development of technologies like AI, Blockchain, and IoT.

Businesses and Quality Assurance (QA) teams can use E2E testing in ensuring a seamless user experience and overall product quality. By simulating real-world scenarios, they can gain valuable insights into how their applications operate, uncover potential issues, improve reliability, and meet customer demands effectively.

Let’s look at a situation where you are testing a banking application that enables fund transfers between accounts to better understand the idea of E2E testing. We will also use this example to understand the best practices listed in the next section.

 A user may perform one or more of the following actions:

1. Access the Banking Application with valid login credentials
2. Initiate a Fund Transfer
3. Check the account balance
4. Add beneficiaries for future fund transfers.
5. Verify transfer details are sent for fund transfers in notifications (email, SMS)

Best Practices for End-to-End Testing

To guarantee a flawless user experience, you need to validate every step of the application’s flow, from start to finish. To know about the importance and benefits, refer to the guide on Intelligent End-to-End Testing.

In this article, let’s take a look at the best practices that will help you achieve better testing outcomes.

1. Plan and prioritize test scenarios from the end-user perspective

Always keep the user in mind. When designing E2E test cases, try to put yourself in the user’s place. Clearly define the objectives and scope of your end-to-end tests. Identify the critical paths and key functionalities of your application or system. Prioritize test scenarios based on their importance and potential impact on the overall system.

For example, in the banking application, the critical flows may include use cases and scenarios:

• Transfer funds between different types of accounts (e.g., savings, checking)
• Test various transaction amounts, including minimum and maximum limits
• Validate the handling of special characters, symbols, and formats of the data

2. Set up test data and environment management

Determine the software and hardware requirements, and set up a dedicated testing environment based on the configurations.

For example, consider the following in the test environment setup for the banking application scenario:

• Hardware: Set up the test environment that replicates the end-user devices, such as desktop computers, laptops, or mobile devices.
• Software: Install the banking application, along with any supporting software or tools required for testing. Ensure that the software versions match the production environment.
• Network: Simulate the network conditions, including connection speed, latency, and security protocols.

You can further streamline the testing process by integrating your end-to-end tests into the existing CI/CD workflows. This way, you can test your code before it makes it to the staging or production environments.

Another critical aspect is effectively managing test data and test environments. Ensure that the test data is consistent, up-to-date, and separate from production data. Teams can accurately reproduce testing scenarios and identify defects.

3. Use realistic test data

Ensure that your test data is realistic, and covers both valid and invalid data to validate different system responses.

Examples of realistic test data for the banking application scenario:

• Generate test data with various account types, customer profiles, and transaction histories
• Include valid and invalid transaction amounts, large transaction amounts, empty or missing details
• Include data with different currencies

4. Test the edge cases

It’s also important to consider edge cases during end-to-end testing. Edge cases are scenarios that deviate from the usual and test the system’s ability to handle such unexpected situations.

In the context of a banking application, edge cases for fund transfers may include:

• Transferring funds with extremely large or small amounts
• Testing the behavior when the system is under high load or network congestion.
• Transferring funds to non-existent or fake account numbers.

5. Leverage Test Automation, and optimize them.

Imagine having a solution that works tirelessly, 24*7, 365 days a year, and at war speed. That’s the power of automation. By embracing automation, teams can improve productivity by eliminating mundane and repetitive tasks and, and focusing on more mission-critical tasks

But do you really need to run all test cases whenever there is a change? No! You can identify the test cases that are impacted by the specific change and run only those cases. Intelligent automation is not just about automating the tests; it’s about running the right tests at the right time, in the right way.

Webomates is one such AI testing tool. With its Shift Left and Self-healing capability, it empowers teams to seamlessly integrate automated testing into their development lifecycle. Teams can resolve any failures in regression tests quickly.

6. Perform Continuous testing

Conduct end-to-end tests at appropriate stages of the development lifecycle, such as after major changes or before releases. This approach allows for timely bug fixes and adjustments, preventing problems from escalating and negatively impacting the end users.

To fully realize the advantages of continuous testing, you can integrate end-to-end testing into the development workflow. This can maximize the effectiveness of the testing efforts and deliver high-quality products to customers consistently.

Here is an example of how continuous testing may be used to test the fund transfer feature of a financial application:

• Create automated test scripts for fund transfer scenarios
• Include these tests into the CI/CD pipeline to trigger test execution after every deployment and code change.
• Track the application’s performance

7. Monitor and analyze test results

Defect triaging helps the development team fix the bugs based on their priority and severity. The AI Defect Predictor tool by Webomates’ generates comprehensive reports and actionable insights, giving visibility into test results, trends, and performance indicators.

They can also help you with test insights into the entire CI/CD pipeline to understand the impact every change is having on the product and enable the stakeholders to make data-driven decisions, pinpoint problem areas, and identify opportunities for improvement.

8. Continuously improve the testing process

You should evaluate and improve your end-to-end testing process on a regular basis. Obtain feedback from stakeholders, identify trends, frequent errors, or performance bottlenecks, and then modify your testing strategy as necessary.

You can determine how effective and efficient the testing process is by setting up and tracking relevant test metrics and KPIs such as defect density, test coverage, and test execution time.

How can Webomates Help You?

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Contact us to discover the full potential of our AI-driven software testing solutions that can boost your business outcomes, increase productivity, and accelerate product releases. Let your team embrace the future of testing and experience firsthand the unparalleled benefits of Intelligent AI testing.