As a long time test automation dev, I would never want to be tasked with e2e browser automation again. I did that for a brief period in my career. It didn't feel like real coding. The tests always seemed like they were barely less maintenance than manual testing. I'm curious how big the e2e web tests suites are for best in breed web software. My opinion has been to minimize the amount of e2e browser tests and do app integration tests solely against the API (assuming there is one!), but I've never specialized in web app testing.
Web frameworks are big enough that even if the API is successful, the UI may be wrong. It’s extremely useful to have good enough UI tests that the dev himself can see what is failing.
See that another way: You, as a human, can’t scale for a team of 50. e2e tests can.
> Web frameworks are big enough that even if the API is successful, the UI may be wrong. It’s extremely useful to have good enough UI tests that the dev himself can see what is failing.
This is absolutely true. Who cares if the JSON payload is correct if the page is wrong?
> I would never want to be tasked with e2e browser automation again
This is how I felt before I started using Cypress. You need a tool that helps you rather than being a drag on you, and you need to commit some time to it. It's helped me learn a lot of coding I didn't otherwise know. Writing the test itself is usually not "real coding" but writing helper methods and learning how to organize your code certainly is. The trick to making it all work is making your tests not flaky. They need to pass 99% of the time. Now we have a few hundred long end-to-end tests and maybe 2 of them are flaky at any given time. They are easy to fix when they break, and they uncover important bugs on a regular basis.
Granted, I'm in the business of testing. Anything that isn't automated I have to do manually. And I have to represent a real user, so simple API tests are not going to cut it, and I have an incentive to automate the entire end-to-end process with multiple variations. But if you want to do short API tests you can certainly do that, and Cypress is actually a nice tool for that too.
