What Is Cypress And Should You Ben Using It For Your Automation Testing?

Cypress is one of the newer testing frameworks out, but what is it, and should you be using it?

This article will cover:

• What is Cypress
• Pros and Cons
• Should You Be Using It

Photo by Emily Morter on Unsplash

What is Cypress?

As stated previously Cypress is a testing framework. It is used for web testing automation. Web testing is also called front-end testing because you will be testing the user interface that the end-users are going to use once the application goes live. You may be thinking, we already have things such as Selenium, why do we need Cypress? Cypress can actually compliment the Selenium web driver and for newbies may be a completely better choice because of the learning/implementing curve.

Traditional testing frameworks have a lot of different components that must be thought about and implemented for end-to-end testing. Cypress tries to solve this problem by providing an all-in-one solution. Many similar tools to cypress are actually Selenium-based. So any difficulties that you had with Selenium may pop up in those other tools as well.

This is where Cypress tries to distance themselves and they built the tool to be completely independent of Selenium. Traditionally, Selenium runs remote commands through the network. Cypress actually runs in the same run loop as the application that you are trying to test.

Another important factor that separates Cypress from others is that all of the tests for it must be written in JavaScript. JavaScript is arguably one of the easiest programming languages to learn especially if you are brand new to coding. All of the JavaScript code can be tested in a web browser. Cypress also tries to stress efficiency. If you get their dashboard service, parallelization, and automated load balancing, you can have extremely fast test speeds.