Alternatives to Ghost Inspector

I am working on #OpenSource file uploader. The uploader is the widget that other developers embed in their apps. It should work well in different browsers and on different devices. BrowserStack and Sauce Labs help to achieve that. I can test the uploader in many varieties of browsers+OS only used my browser without virtual machines.

When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.

For our digital QA organization to support a complex hybrid monolith/microservice architecture, our team took on the lofty goal of building out a commonized UI test automation framework. One of the primary requisites included a technical minimalist threshold such that an engineer or analyst with fundamental knowledge of JavaScript could automate their tests with greater ease. Just to list a few: - Nightwatchjs - Selenium - Cucumber - GitHub - Go.CD - Docker - ExpressJS - React - PostgreSQL

With this structure, we're able to combine the automation efforts of each team member into a centralized repository while also providing new relevant metrics to business owners.

When you think about test automation, it’s crucial to make it everyone’s responsibility (not just QA Engineers'). We started with Selenium and Java, but with our platform revolving around Ruby, Elixir and JavaScript, QA Engineers were left alone to automate tests. Cypress was the answer, as we could switch to JS and simply involve more people from day one. There's a downside too, as it meant testing on Chrome only, but that was "good enough" for us + if really needed we can always cover some specific cases in a different way.

We are in the process of adopting Next.js as our React framework and using Storybook to help build our React components in isolation. This new part of our frontend is written in TypeScript, and we use Emotion for CSS/styling. For delivering data, we use GraphQL and Apollo. Jest, Percy, and Cypress are used for testing.

I use both mocha and Jest because:

• I don't care whether teams use Jest or Mocha. But jest is way too overhyped. Most devs are writing integration tests and think that it's so much better but frankly I don't write integration tests as the way to get both design feedback and confidence when I code. I adhere to the test pyramid, not ice cream cone or the dumb "trophy"

• I TDD, so I only ever use the "API" of test frameworks. I don't do a lot of integration tests for TDD and all the bells and whistles Jest provides you from the command-line I just don't need. And I certainly do not care about or touch Jest Snapshots, I despise them

• My tests are fast enough because I write isolated tests with TDD, so I don't run into performance issues. Example: I write my tests in a way that I can run 300 tests in literally 1 second with mocha. So the Jest ability to pinpoint and only run those tests which are affected by code changes. I want to run all of them every time when I TDD. It's a different mindset when you TDD

• I also mainly code in IntelliJ or WebStorm because I feel the tools in that IDE far surpass VSCode and I also love running the test UI runner in it vs. lousy command-line

• I feel both mocha and Jest read just fine in terms of code readability. Jest might have shorter assertion syntax but I don't really care. I just care that I can read the damn test and my tests are written well and my test descriptions, as well as the code itself including constants represent business language, not technical. I care most about BDD, clean code, 4 rules of simple design, and SOLID

• I don't like using mock frameworks so no I don't use Jest's Mocking framework. I don't have to mock a lot in my tests due to the nature of how I strive to code...I keep my design simple and modular using principals such as clean code and 4 rules of simple design. If I must mock, I create very simple custom mocks with JS

• On the contrary to the belief that integration tests and mount are the way to go (this belief drives me absolutely crazy, especially Dodd's promoting that), I TDD with shallow & enzyme. My tests are simple. My design is driven by my tests and my tests give me quick and useful feedback. I have a course I'm working on coming out soon on TDD with React to show you how to truly test the FE and why the ice cream cone and trophy suck (you're being scammed people). Watch for that here: https://twitter.com/DaveSchinkel/status/1062267649235791873

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Mocha Jest JavaScript React @jsdom Enzyme #tdd #bdd #testdrivendevelopment

We use JUnit and Jest to perform the bulk of our automated test scenarios, with additional work with Apache JMeter for performance testing - for example, the Atlassian Data Center compliance testing is performed with JMeter. Jest provides testing for the React interfaces, which make up the backend of our App offerings. JUnit is used for Unit Testing our Server-based Apps. Mocha is another tool we use.

We are in the process of adopting Next.js as our React framework and using Storybook to help build our React components in isolation. This new part of our frontend is written in TypeScript, and we use Emotion for CSS/styling. For delivering data, we use GraphQL and Apollo. Jest, Percy, and Cypress are used for testing.

As we all know testing is an important part of any application. To assist with our testing we are going to use both Cypress and Jest. We feel these tools complement each other and will help us get good coverage of our code. We will use Cypress for our end to end testing as we've found it quite user friendly. Jest will be used for our unit tests because we've seen how many larger companies use it with great success.

Back in 2014, I was given an opportunity to re-architect SmartZip Analytics platform, and flagship product: SmartTargeting. This is a SaaS software helping real estate professionals keeping up with their prospects and leads in a given neighborhood/territory, finding out (thanks to predictive analytics) who's the most likely to list/sell their home, and running cross-channel marketing automation against them: direct mail, online ads, email... The company also does provide Data APIs to Enterprise customers.

I had inherited years and years of technical debt and I knew things had to change radically. The first enabler to this was to make use of the cloud and go with AWS, so we would stop re-inventing the wheel, and build around managed/scalable services.

For the SaaS product, we kept on working with Rails as this was what my team had the most knowledge in. We've however broken up the monolith and decoupled the front-end application from the backend thanks to the use of Rails API so we'd get independently scalable micro-services from now on.

Our various applications could now be deployed using AWS Elastic Beanstalk so we wouldn't waste any more efforts writing time-consuming Capistrano deployment scripts for instance. Combined with Docker so our application would run within its own container, independently from the underlying host configuration.

Storage-wise, we went with Amazon S3 and ditched any pre-existing local or network storage people used to deal with in our legacy systems. On the database side: Amazon RDS / MySQL initially. Ultimately migrated to Amazon RDS for Aurora / MySQL when it got released. Once again, here you need a managed service your cloud provider handles for you.

Future improvements / technology decisions included:

Caching: Amazon ElastiCache / Memcached CDN: Amazon CloudFront Systems Integration: Segment / Zapier Data-warehousing: Amazon Redshift BI: Amazon Quicksight / Superset Search: Elasticsearch / Amazon Elasticsearch Service / Algolia Monitoring: New Relic

As our usage grows, patterns changed, and/or our business needs evolved, my role as Engineering Manager then Director of Engineering was also to ensure my team kept on learning and innovating, while delivering on business value.

One of these innovations was to get ourselves into Serverless : Adopting AWS Lambda was a big step forward. At the time, only available for Node.js (Not Ruby ) but a great way to handle cost efficiency, unpredictable traffic, sudden bursts of traffic... Ultimately you want the whole chain of services involved in a call to be serverless, and that's when we've started leveraging Amazon DynamoDB on these projects so they'd be fully scalable.

I would like to build a community-based customer review platform for a niche industry where users can sign up for a forum, as well as post detailed reviews of their experience with a company/product, including a rating system for pre-selected features. Something like niche.com or areavibes.com with curated information/data, ratings, reviews, and comparison functionalities.

Is this possible to build using no-code tools? I have read about the possibility of using Webflow with Memberstack, Airtable, and Elfsight through Zapier / Integromat, which may allow for good design and functionality. Is it possible with Bubble or Bildr?

I have no problems with a bit of a learning curve as long as what I want is possible. Since I have 0 coding experience, I am not sure how to go about it.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

For our internal team and collaboration panel we use Nuxt.js (with TypeScript that is transpiled into ES6), Webpack and npm. We enjoy the opinionated nature of Nuxt.js over vanilla Vue.js, as we would end up using all of the components Nuxt.js incorporates anyways and we can adhere to the conventions setup by the Nuxt.js project, which allows us to get better support in case we run into any dead ends. Webpack allows us to create reproducable builds and also debug our application with hot reloads, which greately increased the pace at which we are able to perform and test changes. We also incorporated a lot of testing (ESLint, Chai, Jasmine, Nightwatchjs) into our pipelines and can trigger those jobs through GitLab CI. All packages are fetched through npm, so that we can keep our git repositories slim and are notified of new updates aswell as reported security flaws.

Switched from Jasmine with Karma that come setup by Angular CLI to use Jest instead, since Jasmine and Karma were very finicky in my setup and had to be reconfigured frequently to run tests properly.

Jest was also easier to integrate into my workflow with Visual Studio Code.

For our internal team and collaboration panel we use Nuxt.js (with TypeScript that is transpiled into ES6), Webpack and npm. We enjoy the opinionated nature of Nuxt.js over vanilla Vue.js, as we would end up using all of the components Nuxt.js incorporates anyways and we can adhere to the conventions setup by the Nuxt.js project, which allows us to get better support in case we run into any dead ends. Webpack allows us to create reproducable builds and also debug our application with hot reloads, which greately increased the pace at which we are able to perform and test changes. We also incorporated a lot of testing (ESLint, Chai, Jasmine, Nightwatchjs) into our pipelines and can trigger those jobs through GitLab CI. All packages are fetched through npm, so that we can keep our git repositories slim and are notified of new updates aswell as reported security flaws.

React LoopBack Node.js ExpressJS Elasticsearch Kibana Logstash Sequelize Mocha Chai Visual Studio Code are the combo of technologies being used by me to build BestPrice Extension with all its micro-services & Web-based fragments