What is Front End Testing?

Front End Testing is a testing technique in which Graphical User Interface (GUI), functionality and usability of web applications or a software are tested. The goal of Front end testing is testing overall functionalities to ensure the presentation layer of web applications or a software is defect free with successive updates.

For Example: If you enter your name into the frontend of application, numbers should not be accepted. Another example would be checking the alignment of GUI elements.

Apart from this Frontend testing is conducted for:

CSS Regression Testing: Minor CSS changes that break the frontend layout
Changes to JS files that make the frontend non-functional
Performance Checks

How To Create A Frontend Website Testing Plan?

Creating Frontend testing plan is a simple 4 step process.

Step 1) Find out tools for Managing Your Test Plan

Step 2) Decide the budget for Front End Testing

Step 3) Set the timeline for the entire process

Step 4) Decide the entire scope of the project. The scope includes the following items

OS and browsers used by users ISP plans of your audience
Popular devices used by audience
Proficiency of your audience
Internet correction speed of the audience

Why Create Frontend Testing Plan?

A Frontend Testing plan helps you determine

Browsers
Operating Systems

Your project needs to cover. There are innumerable combinations of Browsers and OS that you could test your front end on. Having a plan will help you reduce the testing effort and money.

By creating frontend testing, plan you will get following advantages-

It helps you to get the complete clarity about the scope of the project
Performing frontend testing also gives confidence in deploying the project

Tips for Better Frontend Testing

Here are some important tips that you need to follow to create better frontend testing plan:

Prepare your budget, resources and time judiciously.
Use a headless browser, so tests are executed faster.
Cut down the amount of DOM rendering in tests for speedier execution.
Isolate test cases, so root cause of the bug is determined quickly for a faster defect fix cycle
Make use your test scripts reusable for faster regression cycles.
You should use consistent naming convention for your test scripts

Front-End Testing Tools

To conduct, various kinds of functionality there are a bunch of useful Frontend testing tools are used. Here are some of them:

JS testing tool:

1. Jasmine

It is a is a behavior-driven development framework to test JavaScript code. The tool focuses more on the business value than on the technical details. It has a clean syntax which helps you to write tests easily. It does not depend on any other JavaScript frameworks. It is heavily influenced by unit testing frameworks, such as JSSpec, ScrewUnit, JSpec, and RSpec.

Functional testing tool:

2. Selenium

Selenium is a frontend testing tool. It performs end to end testing across various browsers & platforms like Windows, Mac, and Linux. It allows you to write tests in different programming languages like Java, PHP, C#, etc. The tool offers record and playback features to write tests without a need to learn Selenium IDE.

CSS tool:

3. CSSLint

CSSLint is an open-source tool written in JavaScript. It is considered the market leader in CSS linting. CSSLint is a very effective front-end tool as it not only works in browsers but also has a command-line interface.

4. BackstopJS

BackstopJS framework is written in Javascript and designed for visual regression testing. The tool allows you to configure test parameters for various viewport sizes and pass/fail conditions easily and quickly.

You need to be aware following two primary challenges for any frontend testing tool-

Test Automation requires plenty of efforts at the initial stage. Therefore, it needs more time and efforts.
Test Tools may have some compatibility issues with Operating Systems and browsers.

Front-End Performance Optimization

Front-end performance testing checks “How fast does page loads.”

Optimizing the front-end performance for a single user is a good practice before testing an application with high user loads.

Why Is Front-End Performance Optimization Important?

Earlier performance optimization meant optimizing server-side. That is because most of the websites were mostly static and most of the processing was done on server side.

However, with the beginning of Web 2.0 technologies, web applications become more dynamic. As a result, client-side code has become a performance hog.

What is the Benefit of Front-End Performance Optimization?

In website testing, apart from server bottlenecks finding the client-side performance issues are equally important as they easily impact the user’s experience.
Improving back-end performance by 50% will increase the application’s overall performance by 10%.
However, improving front-end performance by 50% will increase the application’s overall performance by 40%.
Moreover, front-end performance optimization is easier and more cost-effective than the back-end.

Front-end Performance Testing Tools

1. Page Speed

Page speed is an open-source performance testing add-on launched by Google. The tool evaluates the web page and provides suggestions to minimize loading time. It makes web page retrieval quicker when users access web pages using Google search engine.

2. Pingdom

Pingdom is a website and performance monitoring tool which is dedicated to making the web faster and more reliable. With the help of this tool, customers get alert about any issue so that they can focus on their daily business.

Features:

Examine all parts of a web page
Provide performance overview
Trace your performance history
Allows you to test from multiple locations

Conclusion

Front-end Testing is testing or verifying the frontend functionality, GUI, and Usability.
The main aim of Frontend testing to make sure that every user is well-protected from bugs.
Creating a frontend testing plan helps you to know the devices, browsers, and systems which your project need to cover.
It also helps you to get the complete clarity about the scope of the project
Jasmine, Selenium, Browser, TestComplete, CSSLint are some of the examples of Frontend testing tool.

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