FrontierNav Report: February 2019
Changes in February
General
- Code improvements
- Improved developer tooling
In the fast moving technology stacks of JavaScript, Nightwatch has grown to become one of the most popular front-end end-to-end testing frameworks around. It's an all-in-one solution allowing you to write tests without additional dependencies and effortlessly run them either locally or remotely.
We've been using Nightwatch at Unruly for a year now, and while it's not perfect, it's proven to be a lot more convenient than similar frameworks.
One of the problems we've had with Nightwatch is related to how we debug tests. During deployment, we'd run tens of tests and only one may fail. Finding this failing test and running it in isolation has always been tedious and time consuming since there's no IDE integrations to easily jump around the code base from Nightwatch's output.
This is where Night Patrol comes in. In the simplest sense, Night Patrol does what we would've done manually. It keeps track of various inputs sent to Nightwatch and keeps track of the resulting outputs. In this article, I'll be going through how Night Patrol works and how it's used.