Introduction to Cross-Browser Testing Methodologies

Over the past few years, web technology has advanced significantly. End users are now exposed to a whole new level of mature web apps in the form of responsive and progressive apps, such as React and Flutter. With these advancements, developers are challenged more than ever with ensuring the continuous quality of their web apps, regardless of which platforms (mobile, desktop, or both) they’re being used on.

Goal of this chapter

This chapter covers the most advanced web technologies and web application types we’ll come across, including responsive and progressive types. It’s specifically designed to cover the main trends that typically impact web application developers, along with the various testing types that are relevant to such applications. The web landscape offers developers a wide range of web application types across different application frameworks. Applications such as responsive web, progressive web, Flutter, React Native, and more are only a subset of the range of such applications. In this chapter, we will outline the main application types and what they mean, as well as how they differ from each other to help front-end developers consider different testing activities.

In this chapter, we’ll only discuss the high-level functional and nonfunctional testing types, while later in the course, we’ll also cover API testing and other types of testing as part of the specific test automation framework overview. Each of these types can be divided within the traditional testing pyramid and scoped based on whether there is a major release or a small hotfix release on the market. This chapter will cover the following main topics:

• An overview of the web landscape

• Web application types

• Testing types for web applications

• Headed and headless browsers within app development and testing