DEV Community: Deborah Agboola

Writing your First End-to-End Test with Cypress 10

Deborah Agboola — Sun, 09 Oct 2022 21:57:41 +0000

In this article, you will learn about how to write your first End-to-End test with Cypress. In this article, we will use the Cypress website as the application we are using to test.

This article is a robust tutorial for beginners. You don’t need to have prior programming experience to learn with this article. Everything will be explained to you from how to install an IDE to writing your first End-to-End Test.

What this article is going to cover

What is Cypress
What is End-To-End Testing
Installing Cypress and Running the Cypress launcher
Basic Functions to Know for Cypress
Writing your first Test Script
Running your Test Script

What is Cypress?

Cypress is an all-in-one framework built on Mocha that supports typescript or Javascript, making asynchronous testing simple and convenient.

Cypress is a powerful tool that can be used to perform various tests on an application which includes: E2E, Component, Accessibility, and Visual testing among others.

The speed run is very fast and Cypress tackles the main difficulties that QA engineers and developers have while testing applications.

Cypress makes it possible to Set up Tests, Write Tests, Run Tests, and Debug Tests.

Some of the things that Cypress Provides Includes:

Time Travel: Cypress takes snapshots as your tests run. To acheive this, hover over commands in the Command Log to see exactly what happened at each step.
Debuggability: Cypress enables you to stop guessing why your tests are failing and debug directly from familiar tools like Developer Tools. The readable errors and stack traces in the Cypress runmake debugging lightning fast.
Automatic Waiting: Cypress automatically waits for commands and assertions before moving on.
Consistent Results: The architecture doesn’t use Selenium or WebDriver. Say hello to fast, consistent and reliable tests.
Cross-browser Testing:You can run tests within Firefox and Chrome,Electron and Edge locally and optimally in a Continuous Integration pipeline.

What is End-To-End Testing?

The term "end to end testing" (E2E testing) is a software testing technique that entails examining an application's workflow from start to finish.
Basically, the goal of this technique is to simulate real-world user scenarios in order to test the system's integration and data integrity.

System requirements for running Cypress

Windows 7 and above (64-bit only)
macOS 10.9 and above (Intel or Apple Silicon 64-bit (x64 or arm64))
Linux Ubuntu 12.04 and above
Fedora 21
Debian 8 (x86_64 or Arm 64-bit (x64 or arm64))

see Linux Prerequisites here

Installing your Preferred IDE

To write your end-to-end tests, you would need an integrated development environment, otherwise known as an IDE.
There are various IDEs you can use, but VSCode is highly recommended for this tutorial.

Follow this guide to install VSCode on your respective machine

Creating your test project folder

Create a project folder in any location of your choice on your system.
Once you have done this, open VSCode.Click “File” then click “Open Folder”. Select your project folder.

Opening the Terminal

At the top section of the VSCode IDE, you should see an option “Terminal” alongside other options. Click the option. A modal will pop up. Click “New Terminal”. Automatically a terminal is set up for you for the project, and will pop-up at the bottom of the ide. It looks like this:

Installing Node

To run Cypress, you need to have Node.js installed.
Click here to pick the download version fit for your machine. (the preferred versions are Node.js 12 or 14 and above)
Once Node.js has been installed, go to your VSCode.
Type this code in the terminal - node --version to verify complete installation.

Creating your package.json file

In a Javascript/Node project, a "package. json" file is located in the project's root. It manages the project's dependencies, scripts, versions, and a whole lot more. It maintains the metadata related to the project. You need to create a package.json file inside the project folder.

Once you have node installed on your computer, run this command inside the terminal : npm init -y . This will create a package.json file in the project folder.

Installing Cypress and Running the Cypress launcher

We will install Cypress via NPM (Node Package Manager),

NPM, short for Node package manager, is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language. NPM is a command-line tool for dealing with that repository that helps with package installation, version control, and dependency management.

To install cypress via NPM, go to your terminal . You should check that the folder location in which the terminal is running is exactly the project folder you just created. Run this code in the terminal : npm install cypress --save-dev

Once you have successfully installed Cypress, you should see a new folder in your project folder named “Cypress”

To open Cypress from your project folder:
Run this command in the terminal → npx cypress open

you should see something like this:

Choose a testing type (choose End to End testing for this tutorial)

Choose the browser of your choice on cypress, then click the green button named “Start E2E Testing”.

On the page, choose the browser of your choice, and a dashboard will open.

Creating your Test File

Then click "Create New Empty Spec"
In that folder path, “cypress/e2e”, write the name you want to give your test file .

You should see something pop up like this below

Click the button "Okay, run the spec"

Then the sample code already created for you in your test file will run in the selected browser of your choice.

Basic Functions to Know for Cypress

In Cypress, you will be working with functions and other programming concepts. In this article we will write a few functions in our first test.

A function is a set of instructions that accept inputs, carry out particular calculations, and return results. With a function you can name a collection of statements, making your program simpler to read, comprehend, and debug.
These are the functions we will look at in this tutorial:

describe()
it()
cy.visit()

describe()

The describe() function is basically to give a title to the test case

it()

The it() function is basically used to explain the content of the test case.

cy.visit()

The cy.visit() function is where you will input the link of the site. When you run the test script, the test runner opens the site link you put in the cy.visit() function

Below is an example that contains example code of the functions we just learned:

Writing your first Test Script

/// <reference types = "cypress"/>

describe('My First Test', () => {
    it('visits the cypress landing page', () => {
      cy.visit('https://www.cypress.io/')
    })
  })

above is an example end-to-end test that visits the cypress landing page

Running your test Script

You can write this code in your test file, then open your terminal and run npx cypress open.
Once Cypress opens, look for the name of your test file. Click it and run.

Congrats! you have successfully run your first end-to-end test!

Next Steps

Accessing and Interacting with Elements

Conclusion

Special thanks to Ashimi.0x, Abiola Rasaq, and Ademola Bhadmus for helping out in reviewing this article :)

Do share this article to someone who might find it useful. Thank You.

Cypress Basics - Understanding Test Automation & setting up your Cypress Test project

Deborah Agboola — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 16:44:01 +0000

In the Quality Assurance world, our aim is to ensure quality, and we ensure quality by testing effectively. Test automation is important because in software testing there are a number of features that are required to be tested repetitively and or concurrently. If testing these features is automated (writing and executing of test scripts) it is less time-consuming, and cost-effective and we get accelerated results.

In Continuous Integration, automated tests serve as collections of regression test suites and are crucial for detecting errors as soon as they occur.

What is Test Automation?

Test automation is the practice of writing tests for features that require repetitive testing. It is a form of software testing that uses an automation tool to execute test cases automatically to improve software quality.

NB:- Some testcases can’t be automated and features / testcases are manually tested first before automating.

What Should We Automate?

Test cases that test the essential features of the program.
Test cases that must be run repeatedly on a big dataset.
Test cases that take a lot of time.
Tests cases requiring parallel execution (There are scenarios that require checking the concurrent access to the application e.g. in the case of performance testing with multiple users)

What are the things we should not automate?

UI test cases
New Functionalities
Subjective testing
Usability test cases
Functionalities that are rarely used and take time for scripting
Exploratory testing

When should we Automate?

We can start creating the automation framework in parallel with the development team after outlining all the features of the automation suite during test planning. But it's important to script the test cases at the appropriate moment.

The scripting of test cases should begin when the product (application) is stable and frequent changes in the application are not anticipated.

Test automation with Cypress

Now you will set up your project for writing test scripts in Cypress.

What is Cypress?

Cypress is an all-in-one javascript-only framework(built on Mocha) making asynchronous testing simple and convenient. Cypress is used for testing the functionality of the UI features of the frontend applications. It uses a BDD/TDD assertion library and a browser to pair with any Javascript testing framework. The speed run is very fast, It was built by front-end developers for front-end developers.

Setting up your Project

To work with Cypress, you need to work with the modern javascript toolset, and that toolset includes things like node.js and npm.
You have to install node.js. If you have node.js installed, you have to ensure that the version you have is either equal to or greater than version 8. (check that by running the “node –version” command)

Next, You need an editor, pick any IDE of your choice(Pycharm, Vscode, etc)
When you have the IDE(code editor) of your choice, you can now install Cypress. Cypress is an NPM package. Usually, we install NPM packages in the same folder where the test code will be.

The first thing will be to create the folder where our test code will reside. Once you create that folder, open the folder with the IDE of your choice. Once the folder has been opened in your IDE, then you create a package.json file. To do this, open a terminal in your IDE and run this command inside the project folder:

npm init -y

When you run this command above, the package.json file will be created for you inside the project folder. You need this package.json folder so that when you install Cypress in this test folder, it will be registered in the package.json file that you have Cypress installed in your test project folder. Also, the same terminal is activated to run NPM commands. We are going to use NPM commands to install Cypress.

Cypress is just another package in the NPM repository. Cypress is free to install, though it has some other interesting features you might want to pay for. Cypress is Open Source as well.

When you install Cypress inside this folder, you are installing it locally, which means Cypress will only run in that folder. This is good because it enables us to have different versions of Cypress running on our system when we need to.

In order to install Cypress, run this command:

npm install cypress --save-dev cypress

Note that this installation might take a while if you are installing Cypress for the first time (This creates the node modules and package-lock.Json File)

Once your installation is complete, you should see a folder named cypress inside your test project folder which contains some other folders- Integration, Fixtures, Plugins, and support. Now you are good to go!

Running Cypress

To run Cypress, you use NPX commands.
In order to run Cypress, run this command:

npx cypress open

Once you run this command, a window opens that contains some sample tests you can run.
Explore the examples to see how Cypress works.

Next Steps

The next step is to Write your first Test. Have fun!

Learn how to use Discord and get whitelisted for NFT projects

Deborah Agboola — Sat, 02 Apr 2022 10:01:44 +0000

When I started learning about NFTs, I joined a whitelist hunting group, which I initially thought was to guide newbies into the NFT space. Then, the members began sharing invites to discord servers to get whitelisted.

First, I didn’t know what a whitelist meant, and when I joined one of the discord servers, I became confused about what happened there.

Still, I tried following the instructions on the server, but I started seeing people’s names with verified icons, and some people were requesting to get whitelisted. I got tired of the whole process because everything was looking too complicated.

Later on, I decided to take my time to understand the whole context of whitelisting and how to use discord to get whitelisted. I also learned other things like NFT minting, which this article covers below.

What is a whitelist?

A whitelist is a list owned by the NFT project that contains the list of people that have access to an NFT project before it goes public. Let’s say that there is a party that starts at 9:00 PM, but some people would be on a particular list that have access to enter the party earlier than the time speculated. In that scenario, those particular people are on the whitelist.

The people on the whitelist have authorized access to mint an NFT at a cheaper rate before the NFT is released into the market.

What does it mean to get whitelisted?

If you get whitelisted, your wallet address will be put on the list owned by the NFT project so that when it’s time to mint, you will have access to mint the NFT for free or at a very low price.

Just the way a preorder is usually cheaper than the actual launch price, being whitelisted gives you access to buy a presale of an NFT before launch or before it goes into any secondary market.

Why should I want to get whitelisted?

You should aim to get whitelisted for apparent reasons because you can get the NFT at a very low price. For some whitelists, you only need to cover the cost of the gas fee, and you get access to the NFT, e.g., the Arbitrum trend.

How do I get whitelisted?

To be whitelisted, you may be required to complete specific tasks and challenges assigned by the NFT project. Some NFT projects also organize events like as competitions, quizzes, and so on. Rumble is also popularly used to get whitelisted.

Tasks the admins of the NFT project might want you to do include:

Contributing to their community and being active on their Discord server.
Retweeting and liking something on their Twitter page and following them
Doing tasks created by the NFT project.

What is Discord?

Discord is a chat app initially intended for use by gamers for VoIP (Voice-over-Internet Protocol), but it has gained more popularity as the NFT hype came along. Now people join Discord servers of NFT projects to get whitelist roles.

Why are projects using discord for their NFT whitelisting process?

One major reason is the anonymity you can maintain while on Discord. You don’t have to reveal any information to join discord servers, and you can also talk openly without fear of being bullied or receiving racist comments. The admins are there to kick out anyone who violates the rules of the community. Furthermore, the servers can accommodate a large number of people. As a result, NFT projects use Discord for their whitelisting activities.

How to use discord?

If you do not yet have an account on discord, you can create an account here or download the app on your phone or your pc.

How does discord work?

Communities for NFT projects are hosted on Discord servers.
This is what a discord server looks like:

Discord's servers are like virtual environments. Specific communities and friend groups create them. The vast majority of servers are modest and only accessible by invitation. Some of the larger servers are open to the public. Any user can create a new server and invite their friends to join it for free.

On the Discord server, channels are similar to group conversations. Discord servers are divided into text and voice channels, each of which is dedicated to a certain topic and has its own set of rules. There can be multiple channels on a Discord server, depending on the admins.

On role creation and getting a whitelist role

The admins of the server can create roles depending on what they want to do, and the admins decide the names to give the roles. A role is like a position you have in a discord server. Those roles are given to people by the admins of the NFT project.

Examples of roles commonly assigned to members by the admins are WL(whitelist) roles and OG roles. You can get a whitelist role by doing the things they tell you to do. OG roles are usually assigned for the first people to enter the discord channel, e.g first 50 or first 25 to join the discord channel.

The OG role is also given to people who are immensely contributing and helping out and improving the community. They are popular on the server, and the developers on the admin server recognize them. There are benefits of OJ roles (for instance when people on whitelist roles are only able to mint one NFT, people with OG roles will be able to mint two or three NFTs).

Note: One important thing to note is that you need to ensure you follow the rules and regulations on the discord servers. You also have to ensure that the Discord server you are joining is credible. If you heard of the Iconics NFT rug pull, you would know how important it is.

What's the next thing to do after I get the whitelist role?

When you get your whitelist role, the next thing you must do depends on the discord server admins. They might create another channel for you to submit your wallet address or do a pre-minting where you have to connect your Twitter account and your wallet address to get verified.

When you get a whitelist role, you have to do one of these stated above. And it would be best if you did these things within the time they tell you or before mint-day, depending on the server. If not, even if you still have the whitelist role, you won’t be able to mint when the minting day comes because they register the wallet addresses to their website so that only eligible people will be able to mint the NFTs.

How do I mint an NFT?

When you want to mint an NFT, you pay for the minting and gas fees. They are fees paid separately. But nowadays, there are some NFTs that allows you mint freely (which means you don’t have to pay a minting fee, but you will still pay for gas fees). The gas fees are present because you are signing a contract under blockchain(Eg. Ethereum).

Blockchains with cheap gas fees:

Arbitrum
Polygon
Bsc
Elrond
Algo

After Minting the NFT what Next?

After Minting the NFT, you can decide to sell the NFT, or you can choose to let it grow in value before you sell the NFT later on. The concept of buying and selling is called NFT flipping.

On using Burner Wallets to prevent getting Scammed

If you heard about the Iconics NFT rug pull scam that wiped all the money people had in the wallet address they connected the NFT to their wallet, you would understand how important it is to have a separate wallet for transactions that will only have things like gas fees for transactions and the likes.

Creating a separate wallet for storing your NFTs and your coins, of which I advise you to have more than one wallet, Just in case you submit your wallet address and it gets wiped by an illegal smart contract, you would not feel too bad because you only had your gas fees and minting fees in that wallet.

What is the hype about NFTs?

Deborah Agboola — Sun, 20 Mar 2022 07:56:48 +0000

I first heard about NFTs from the @tag-comics Instagram page. They create and post African-oriented comics and have a particular comic that discusses how to make money by creating NFTs from artworks. Also, one of my favorite afro-centric artists - @indaviduall , sold a couple of his art as NFTs for high prices.

These events inspired me to learn that NFTs create a side gig that can become an income stream. Before you start making money from NFTs, you should know what an NFT is.

What are NFTs?

A Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is a digital token or an asset stored on a blockchain that can be sold and traded.

Here is why NFTs are not fungible: It is possible to say that 1 dollar is equal to another 1 dollar and can be used to replace each other at any time. The case is different for NFTs. An NFT is not equal to another NFT, hence the non-fungibility.

A fungible item is an item that is replaceable by another identical item or is mutually interchangeable. Likewise, Non-fungibility means that you cannot copy, substitute, or subdivide an item by another item even if they are identical.

What is a Token?

A token is a small piece of data that signifies something belongs to you and is provable on the blockchain, which serves as a form of the public ledger for crypto transactions.

Recently, the NFT hype has been around digital art, but it’s much more than art in reality. You can sell anything as an NFT, music inclusive, e.g., you could sell a piece of music or an album as Audio NFTs. Everyone has been talking about NFTs since the day Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet as an NFT for 2.9 million dollars. Humans went bonkers about NFTs even though the concept has been around since 2014.

Things to know about NFTs:

When buying an NFT, you are purchasing the rights to the asset. NFTs are just a piece of data owned by an address, more like a certificate of ownership and whoever has the password to that address owns that piece of data. The owner of this address can sell this piece of data to another address, and this data is verifiable by the blockchain.

When you buy an NFT, you buy a piece of data that points to a server that hosts the linked media file.

What Makes an NFT valuable?

People buy NFTs because they see them as collectibles and investments. Here are a couple of factors that give NFTs value:

If it’s the first of its kind: Just the way bitcoin is the most valuable coin because it was the first of its kind.
Utility: if it has Real-world benefits. E.g. membership community, monthly launch meeting, etc.
If it is Unique or Rare: e.g. Monalisa painting
Ownership History: People might want to buy an NFT if it has been previously owned by a popular person

Can someone copy your NFT?

Yes, just the way someone can make a copy of the Monalisa picture. But you can trace the original NFT address back to the original creator since all NFTs have a log of their transaction history.

Bear in mind that the value of an NFT is not in the image. The value of the NFT is in the piece of data attached to it.

What does it mean to mint an NFT?

Minting NFT refers to turning a digital file into a crypto collectible or digital asset on the blockchain. The digital item or file is stored in this decentralized and distributed database forever. It is impossible to edit, modify, or delete the NFT.

How long does it take to mint an NFT?

NFT platforms, marketplaces, and tools have made minting NFTs easy, so it depends on you, and it can be as fast as you want.

What happens after you sell your NFT?

When you sell your NFT, you transfer ownership of rights, which is that piece of data, to the address that purchased your NFT.

What does it mean to list NFTs?

Just the way in a superstore, items are arranged with price and specific quantity per item type, e.g., having 100 pieces of apples sold at $3 each. That’s what NFT listing is. You tell the world that you have a specific asset up for sale.

Here are a couple of marketplaces to list your NFTs:

How do you buy an NFT?

It will be similar to the way you buy a company's stock. Most NFTs are sold on marketplaces, basically online stores that specialise in NFTs.

You can purchase an NFT on a good number of platforms using the Ethereum (ETH) token. This means you will need to have ETH in your crypto wallet in order to be able to make the purchase transaction. While on the topic of Ethereum, you may need to have some cryptocurrency trading knowledge in order for you to be able to figure out how get ETH into your wallet.

You could buy NFTs from the market places I listed earlier above.

You should also know that NFTs can be auctioned, and you can decide to bid on an NFT, and if you win, the NFT is added your account and the information will be stored in your wallet.

Where do you store your NFTs?

You store it in a crypto wallet. Ensure it is a safe and secure wallet you save it in. The best way to keep your NFTs is on a hardware wallet (e.g., a ledger nano, which is similar to an Arduino UNO) where it can be offline and protected.

But if you want to keep your NFTs online, some online applications host wallets for you, like metamask.io, trustwallet.com, and walletengine.io.

How to Setup a Data Science Project - Creating a virtual environment

Deborah Agboola — Thu, 25 Mar 2021 09:22:23 +0000

As a data scientist, or a software engineer, or whatever you are doing, you have to ensure that your code is clean, reusable, and iterable upon.

There are certain basic rituals you do as a data scientist before start working on your project. That is setting up the environment in which you will work on.

As you work on projects, you have to be careful not to install the packages you need for your project directly on your system. It is strongly advised even as you work with other people.

You should have a virtual environment for each project you want to work on.
Why? This is because of the dependencies your project will need. You don't want confusion concerning the packages your application will need. When you create a virtual environment and install the necessary packages that your project will need, the package names are listed in your requirements.txt file so that when your teammate needs to work on that project with you, s/he will be able to install only the packages and dependencies s/he needs for the project by typing this code below.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Setting Up Your Virtual Environment

Create the folder you want to use for the project
Open the command line terminal. copy the file path of the terminal and paste it into the command line.
Create a virtual environment using the code below

python -m venv name-of-virtual-environment

Activate the virtual environment

A folder will be created in your project folder. if you look into the folder, you will see a bunch of folders and files. copy the path of the folder and paste it into the command line

In that scripts folder, there is a file called activate.bat

we are going to run that file in order to activate the virtual environment

activate.bat

Now your virtual environment has been activated on your project folder, you can start installing the dependencies you will need.

Note:
If you use a Linux environment, since you will be working on the terminal, just do this code below

source name-of-environment/bin/activate

It's straightforward.

I hope you learnt something new.
Happy Coding!!! 🥳🎉

DEV Community: Deborah Agboola

Writing your First End-to-End Test with Cypress 10

What this article is going to cover

What is Cypress?

Some of the things that Cypress Provides Includes:

What is End-To-End Testing?

System requirements for running Cypress

Installing your Preferred IDE

Creating your test project folder

Opening the Terminal

Installing Node

Creating your package.json file

Installing Cypress and Running the Cypress launcher

Creating your Test File

Basic Functions to Know for Cypress

describe()

it()

cy.visit()

Writing your first Test Script

Running your test Script

Next Steps

Conclusion

Cypress Basics - Understanding Test Automation & setting up your Cypress Test project

What is Test Automation?

What Should We Automate?

What are the things we should not automate?

When should we Automate?

Test automation with Cypress

What is Cypress?

Setting up your Project

Running Cypress

Next Steps

Learn how to use Discord and get whitelisted for NFT projects

What is a whitelist?

What does it mean to get whitelisted?

Why should I want to get whitelisted?

How do I get whitelisted?

What is Discord?

Why are projects using discord for their NFT whitelisting process?

How to use discord?

How does discord work?

On role creation and getting a whitelist role

What's the next thing to do after I get the whitelist role?

How do I mint an NFT?

After Minting the NFT what Next?

On using Burner Wallets to prevent getting Scammed

Further Reading

What is the hype about NFTs?

What are NFTs?

What is a Token?

Things to know about NFTs:

What Makes an NFT valuable?

Can someone copy your NFT?

What does it mean to mint an NFT?

How long does it take to mint an NFT?

What happens after you sell your NFT?

What does it mean to list NFTs?

How do you buy an NFT?

Where do you store your NFTs?

Further reading

How to Setup a Data Science Project - Creating a virtual environment