Trends in Cross Browser Testing and Web Development

The web market has shifted a lot over the past few years alongside the mobile space. We see a clear use of specific development languages, development frameworks, and, of course, specific test frameworks aimed to test Angular, jQuery, Bootstrap, .NET, and others.

From a Dev Language perspective, front-end developers are mostly using the following languages as part of their job:

Source: http://vintaytime.com/premium/top-programming-languages/

As a clear trend in web development, it shows that JavaScript is the leading language used by web developers. It's actually not a huge surprise since if you move to the top frameworks used by these web developers, you will see that quite a few are based on JavaScript.

There are some trends seen recently by developers around shifting to non-Angular web development frameworks like Aurelia, React, and Vue.js that are seeing a growing usage and adoption by developers. With this trend in mind, and as you'll read in my references below, the new solutions are still not as complete as Angular.

• Shorter learning curve.
• Simple to use, clean.
• Flexibility.
• Lightweight compared to others.
• Better performing.
• Easy to integrate with other front-end stack tools.
• Responsive server-side rendering (Vue.js supports it, reduces the time for users to see rendered content).
• SEO friendly.
• Good documentation and Community Support.
• Good debugging capabilities.

Source 1: https://www.slant.co/topics/4306/~angular-js-alternatives

Source 2: https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/js-angularjs/all/all

Now, that we have seen the leading web development languages and frameworks used these days, let's drill down into what test automation engineers are adopting.

Selenium, without a doubt, is the leading and base for most frameworks, however, even in this space, we see new and innovative test frameworks such as CasperJS, TestCafe, Buster.JS, Nightwatch.js together with the traditional Webdriver.io and of course Protractor.

If we examine the below visual (Source: NPM Trends), there's a clear market dominance between Selenium and Protractor that underneath its implementation does uses Selenium WebDriver, and supports Jasmine and Mocha tools.

The advantage of tools like Protractor is that they support much easier web sites that were developed in various frameworks like AngularJS, Vue.js, etc. Such advantages allow test automation engineers to agnostically use them for multiple websites, regardless of the frameworks they are built with.

Thre are few other players in that space that are aimed at specific unit testing, and headless browser testing (PhantomJS, CasperJS, JSDom, etc.).

From a test automation strategy perspective, teams might find it beneficial and more complete to leverage a set of test frameworks rather than using only one. If the aim is to have non-UI headless browser testing together with Unit testing and also UI based testing, then a combination of tools like Protractor, CasperJS, and QUnit might be a valid approach.

I hope you find this post useful and can find your way in the hectic tools landscape. As always, it is important to match the tool to the product requirements, development methodology (BDD, Agile, Waterfall, etc.), supported languages, and more.