The alternative is deciding to ignore test failures in favor of shipping, which creates an imbalance of favoring speed too much over product quality.<\/strong> And this happens! Because (1) a bunch of notifications about test failures that turn out to be false-positives starts to feel like low-signal noise and (2) devs are incentivized to ship. <\/p>\n\n\n\nUltimately, ignoring even just a few test failures often leads to a destructive cycle: the results of the E2E test suite are ignored, so the value of the test suite is diminished, so less investment goes into the E2E test suite, making it less reliable. Which makes it easier to justify ignoring the test results. Ultimately, quality is put at risk for the sake of speed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Debugging takes longer<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
When a unit test fails, you know exactly which software component isn\u2019t behaving as expected. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
But E2E tests are more complex. They inherently test more components \u2014 and more relationships between components \u2014 at a time, so pinpointing the exact cause of a failure can take longer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rainforest provides detailed E2E test results including repro steps, video recordings, HTTP logs, and browser logs to make debugging as easy as possible. But even so, it\u2019ll almost always require more effort to analyze and update a failed E2E test than a unit or integration test.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When you run E2E tests too often, you\u2019re not just inviting <\/strong>more frequent<\/em><\/strong> test maintenance onto your team\u2019s plate \u2014 it\u2019s specifically test maintenance that tends to be <\/strong>more expensive<\/em><\/strong>. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/span>Your E2E testing action plan<\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n\nEnd-to-end automated tests are a valuable part of any test plan \u2014 they cover the most critical end-user workflows in your application, confirming that all the software components under test are operating and interacting as expected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But they\u2019re also relatively expensive to run \u2014 not just in terms of compute and time, but also in terms of maintenance costs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, following the principles of the testing pyramid, run your E2E tests as the \u201clast line of defense\u201d against bugs before you\u2019re ready to release to your customers. (Often, that means testing before you release to your production environment.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Earlier in the development process, to balance speed and quality, avoid the temptation to (over)use E2E tests and instead implement unit tests and integration tests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Learn the reasons why you should only run E2E tests when you’re ready to release to customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-qa-strategy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2699"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3362,"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2699\/revisions\/3362"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rainforestqa.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}