Testing React Single Page Web Application using Automated Testing Tools

Abstract

In modern software development practices, single page application development is becoming popular. Among the available frameworks, React is a popular platform to develop web applications front-end. For most of the software, almost half of the application code is for the front-end. Therefore testing the front-end or GUI is also almost equally important. In modern application development, React is by far the most popular front-end framework/library. In modern development practice, like agile development or CI/CD development, testing performance and the easiness of implementing testing tools are very crucial factor. In this paper, three different testing tools, Jest, Enzyme and Cypress specifically designed for React based single page application, were analysed. The main objective is to check the execution time performance for the same testing functionality on different tools, and developer friendliness of these tools. While each tool having their own features and limitations, for modern development practices like Agile or CI/CD, Enzyme is tested as a better tool which is both easy to integrate while providing efficiency.